PART TWO
MARKET RESPONSE

Six
Land Concentration and Income Distribution in Republican China

Loren Brandt and Barbara Sands

There is reason to think that in the (last) twenty years . . . occupying ownership has lost ground. . . . The fact of concentration can hardly be questioned. . . . Over a large part of China, tenancy of one kind or another undoubtedly predominates and it appears everywhere to be increasing .
—RICHARD TAWNEY, AGRARIAN CHINA (1938)

These remarks by the British historian Richard Tawney typify much of the thinking both in China and in the West about the growing concentration of landholdings in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century rural China. Perceptios of widening disparities in land ownership in turn underlie a nearly endless list of critical assessments of the changing distribution of incomes and economic welfare during the same period. Carl Riskin, for example, argues: "Chinese rural society was hardly egalitarian with respect to the distribution of income and wealth: and although characterized by substantial social mobility, the predominant direction for the latter was downward, at least in relative terms."^[1] Harry Harding similarly notes: "Though still prone to drought, flood, and plague, China's rural economy could, in most years, also produce the surplus to support one of the world's most advanced urban civilizations and most highly bureaucratic states. But the distribution of that output was increasingly unequal."^[2]

Quite often these concerns of widening inequality are accompanied by observations of increasing population pressure and the lack of technological change; indeed, the received economic story of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century agrarian China is one of increasing immiseration for the populace in general and a relative worsening for the rural poor. Political events in the first half of the twentieth century involving two major regime

[1] Carl Riskin, China's Political Economy (New York, 1986), p. 32.

[2] See Harry Harding, China's Second Revolution: Reform after Mao (Washington, D.C., 1987), p. 13.

changes have only strengthened these views of China's recent troubled past, if not fired them directly.^[3]

Empirical support for this history is, however, quite limited. This is particularly true for questions concerning the distribution of land ownership and economic welfare. Despite the keen interest in the development literature concerning questions of distribution and their obvious historical relevancy to the case of China, they have been largely neglected.^[4] Moreover, China's distributive record prior to 1949 has rarely been put in any kind of comparative perspective.

The purpose of our paper is to reexamine a number of issues relating to the distribution of land ownership and economic welfare in the pre-1949 economy. Because the historical data on distribution are spotty at best and China itself is so diverse, this paper is largely exploratory, and some of its findings preliminary in nature. Despite these limitations, based on data presently at our disposal, we make the following points.

First, we have failed to find convincing evidence that land ownership became more concentrated during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Second, even if concentration increased, it cannot be inferred that the increase necessarily heralded increasing immiseration or welfare inequality. A number of alternative processes can underlie increasing concentration in land ownership with opposing interpretations for the behavior of economic welfare. Third, drawing on survey materials for the 1930s, some of them covering all of China and others relating only to a select number of North China villages, we have calculated measures of income distribution that suggest income inequality was much lower in rural early twentieth-century China than has been previously inferred on the basis of data on land distribution alone; in fact, when compared with other low-income countries, China actually appears to be on the moderate side. Moreover, the estimates of income inequality that we have obtained fall within the limits some Chinese officials have recently recommended for their rural sector.

These observations suggest that the current view of China's modern economic history is uncertain at best and yet to be firmly established by contem-

[3] Philip C. C. Huang, in fact, argues that these imbalances underlay the social and political upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. See his Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (Stanford, 1985), p. 293. Exceptions to this conventional wisdom include two books: Thomas G. Rawski, Economic Growth in Prewar China (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), and Loren Brandt, Commercialization and Agricultural Development: Central and Eastern China, 1870–1937 (Cambridge, 1989).

[4] C. Robert Roll's unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (Harvard University, 1974) represents the only empirical investigation of income distribution in pre-1949 rural China that we are aware of. Ramon H. Myers, in The Chinese Peasant Economy: Agricultural Development in Hopei and Shantung, 1890–1949 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), on the other hand, examines changes in land distribution in North China from the 1890s to the 1940s.

porary quantitative evidence. In the sections below, we take each of the above points in turn and discuss our findings.

Increasing Concentration of Landholdings?

Concerns over a rise in the concentration of landholdings and growing tenancy were voiced in China prior to the early twentieth century. During the late Ming and Qing, for example, government officials regularly expressed alarm over what appeared to be an increasing accumulation of land by the wealthy and a decline in the holdings of smaller farm households. These developments are frequently linked to the commercialization and market development of the period.^[5] Are data consistent with views of a secular rise in land concentration?

Reasonably good data on land ownership exist for the early twentieth century. On the basis of data compiled by the National Land Commission in 1934 on almost 1.75 million rural households residing in 16 provinces, Table 6.1 presents an estimate of the size distribution of landholdings for rural China.^[6] These aggregate data are complemented by many village-level surveys undertaken during the 1920s and 1930s.^[7] Both kinds of data confirm what others have long argued—the distribution of land ownership in rural China was highly unequal—and on the surface are consistent with the view that distribution may have been worsening. For the distribution in Table 6.1, the Gini coefficient, a frequently used measure of inequality, is 0.72.^[8] The top 1 percent of rural households owned approximately 18 percent of the land;

[5] See, for example, Yang Yi, "Qingchao qianqi de tudi zhidu," Shehui yuekan 7 (1958): 21–26, and Fu Yiling, "Guanyu Mingmo Qingchu Zhongguo nongcun shehui guanxi de xin guji," Xiamen daxue xuebao 6 (1959): 57–70.

[6] These data suffer from a number of omissions that have been overlooked. These problems are discussed in more detail in Brandt, Commercialization and Agricultural Development , chap. 6.

[7] The results of 47 surveys carried out between 1931 and 1941 are reported in Chao Kang [Zhao Gang] and Chen Chung-yi [Chen Zhongyi], Zhongguo tudi zhidu shi (Taibei, 1982), pp. 234–38. A majority of these are the product of the research efforts of the South Manchurian Railway Company and can be found in Minami Manshu Tetsudo Kabushiki Kaisha, Mantetsu chosa geppo .

[8] The Gini coefficient is equal to 1 minus 2 times the area under the Lorenz curve. The Lorenz curve, based on an arrangement of households in ascending order of income, relates the cumulative proportion of households to the cumulative proportion of income received. The Gini coefficient can assume a value between 0 and 1 with a measure of 0 implying a uniform distribution of incomes (or assets) across the population and the measure 1 implying extreme inequality. It can also be interpreted as the expected gain—measured as a percentage of the mean for the population—of a lottery in which each person is allowed to draw an income at random from the population and compare it with his or her own. Thus, when incomes are uniformly distributed, the expected gain is 0, as would be the Gini coefficient. The more concentrated incomes are, the larger the expected gain will be. See Graham Pyatt, "On the Interpretation and Disaggregation of Gini Coefficients," Economic Journal 86 (June 1976): 243–55.

the top 5 percent owned nearly 39 percent; and the top 10 percent owned around 53 percent. By contrast, slightly more than a quarter of all rural households were landless, and an additional quarter owned less than 5 mu . Similar percentages are suggested by the village-level data.

The problem is that comparable information on the previous distribution of landholdings, be it 25 years earlier or 200, presently does not exist. For the Qing we are limited to a handful of observations at the county and village level that simply are too few to generalize about. Table 6.2, nonetheless, documents one such case: the distribution of landholdings in the early eighteenth century for several subdivisions in Huailu County, Hebei, and village-level data in the same county 200 years later.^[9] At least for this North China village the distributions are very similar, though, not unexpectedly, average farm size in 1939 was slightly lower than in either 1706 or 1736.

While data on landholdings are also seriously deficient for the late nineteenth century, additional information on such things as the percentage of land that was rented out and the hiring of long-term labor, either or both of which typically accompany an increasing concentration of landholdings,

[9] Additional pre-twentieth-century data can be found in Kang Chao, Man and Land in Chinese History (Stanford, 1986), chap. 6.

suggests no long-term rise in the half-century between the 1880s and 1930s. Estimates of land rental, for example, reveal that in both periods approximately a third of cultivated acreage was rented, two thirds of which was owned by absentee landlords.^[10] We have not uncovered estimates of the number of long-term agricultural laborers for the 1880s—though qualitative evidence suggests their numbers were substantial—but of the 1.75 million rural households surveyed by the National Land Commission in the 1930s, only 1.57 percent were classified as landless, laboring households, that is, households earning a living as long-term contract agricultural laborers.^[11] Finally, over the 25-year period between 1912 and 1937, the percentage of households classified as owner-operators failed to decrease, as we might expect had tenancy been on the rise.^[12]

On the basis of these very limited data we do not want to push any view very far, especially one suggesting that the degree of concentration of landholdings remained constant for several hundred years. As we will explain

[10] Chung-li Chang has estimated that about a third of all land was rented in the 1880s, or roughly the same percentage as in the 1930s. See Chung-li Chang, The Income of the Chinese Gentry (Seattle, 1962), p. 145.

[11] Tudi Weiyuanhui, Quanguo tudi diaocha baogao gangyao (Nanjing, 1937), p. 34.

[12] Nongqing baogao 5, no. 12 (Dec. 15, 1937): 330.

below, over the long run there were a number of alternative processes simultaneously influencing land concentration; and indeed, it would be odd if these processes offset one another exactly. Nonetheless, the point needs to be made that data presently at out disposal simply cannot support the popularly held view that the high degree of concentration of landholdings observed in the 1930s was the product of several decades (or centuries) of increasing inequality.

Finally, although in the 1930s 10 percent of the population owned over half the farmland in China, can this be considered extreme compared to landholding patterns in other countries? Interestingly, data compiled by Peter H. Lindert suggest that it was not extreme. Concentration in China is markedly less than in Mexico in the 1920s, where 10 percent of the households owned an estimated 64–99 percent of the land and 79 percent were landless, or in Victorian England (excluding London), where 85 percent of all households owned no land and 10 percent owned 82 percent of the land; and it is actually slightly better than that estimated separately for farming households and the entire rural population (whites only) in the United States—certainly not noted for its extreme concentration—in both 1798 and 1860.^[13] In many respects, land distribution in China in the 1930s is very similar to that estimated for post-independence India.^[14]

Historical Processes

From the perspective of many observers, land sales by indebted smallholders were the major underlying cause for the increasing concentration of landholdings. Farm households borrowed for a variety of reasons: to obtain working capital, to meet consumption needs in times of emergency, and in some cases to help cover major ceremonial expenses, such as weddings and funerals. To secure these loans, land was frequently pledged as collateral. In still other cases, the rights of land use were ceded to the lender, with the income generated from the land serving as the interest. Once the loan was repaid, rights of land use reverted back to the original owner. This land was commonly referred to as diandi .

In many cases, borrowers were unable to service these loans. Han-seng Chen's description is typical: "When a poor peasant in China mortgages his bit of land, he has practically no hope of ever getting it back. Everything conspires against him in his frantic effort to meet the interest charges, and eventually he loses not only the land but also this additional fruit of his

[13] Peter Lindert, "Who Owned Victorian England? The Debate over Landed Wealth and Inequality," Agricultural History 61, no. 4 (1987): 25–51.

[14] I. Z. Bhatty, "Inequality and Poverty in Rural India," in Poverty and Income Distribution in India , ed. T. N. Srinivasan and P. K. Bardhan (Calcutta, 1974).

labor."^[15] These difficulties were invariably attributed to declining economic fortunes caused by high taxes and land rents, local disaster, depressed agricultural conditions, and so forth. If land was used as collateral, it might simply be forfeited; if an asset other than land secured the loan, land still might have to be sold to make repayment. If land-use rights were ceded to the lender, the possibility of redeeming the land in the near future became even more remote.^[16] With the loss of their land, small cultivators were invariably forced either to rent back the same land from the new owners or possibly to hire out as wage laborers. This explains the link implicit in the opening quote from Tawney between rising tenancy (or perhaps wage labor) and a growing concentration of landholdings.

Although some small farm households were unquestionably forced to relinquish ownership of their land during times of economic duress, this analysis suffers from several weaknesses; moreover, there are a number of equally compelling explanations for increasing concentration of landholdings and a rise in tenancy with alternative implications for the secular behavior of incomes.^[17]

For example, in asserting that the loss of land through debt-sales gives rise to an increasing concentration of land ownership, there is an implicit assumption of who the borrowers and lenders were, the lenders typically being larger landowners/landlords, frequently absentee, the borrowers, on the other hand, being primarily poorer, small farm households that had earlier exhausted all personal financial resources. Although larger landowners were usually heavily involved in the credit market, a detailed examination of land and credit arrangements in three diverse villages in North China reveals that lending activity was more diversified among households than previously believed; in other words, lending activity was not limited to a class of big landowners. In fact, in a majority of those cases involving diandi , farm households with less than 30 mu were the creditors. The borrowers were frequently larger landowners themselves in need of capital.^[18] Data compiled by John Lossing Buck on lending activity in 151 localities in 16 provinces are very

[15] Han-seng Chen, Landlord and Peasant in China (New York, 1936), p. 95.

[16] In some cases, the rights of land use were actually rented back to the original owner. According to Madeleine Zelin, failure to fulfill the rental agreement could mean the total alienation of the original owner from the land. See Zelin, "The Rights of Tenants in Mid-Qing Sichuan," Journal of Asian Studies 45, no. 3 (May 1986): 499–526.

[17] Please recall, however, our earlier remarks regarding the uncertainty over the inter-temporal behavior of land distribution.

[18] Based on an examination of contracts involving diandi in the surveys cited in n. 33. In the villages we examined, the amount of land that villagers had obtained the farming rights to through diandi exceeded the amount of land that they had ceded the rights to . The likely explanation for this is that some of the former was owned by absentee landlords or perhaps village members who had migrated yet wanted to retain some claim to village resources should they decide to return.

consistent with the village-level data for North China: for only 8 percent of all loans were landlords and other wealthy households cited as the source of credit. Much more important were relatives and neighbors.^[19]

Observations such as these make generalizations about the relationship between forced land sales and increasing concentration difficult without much more careful examination of credit and land markets in rural China. Moreover, even if it is true that land ownership was increasingly concentrated, this does not necessarily mean that income became more concentrated as well. John R. Shepherd has recently pointed out that there are alternative historical processes capable of simultaneously generating an increasing concentration of landholdings and a rise in tenancy which do not necessarily imply increasing immiseration of the rural poor.^[20] These include an expansion in cultivated area through investment by wealthy households in land reclamation, migration of landless households into such areas because of better economic opportunities, and shifts in forms of landlord farm management. These processes could operate during periods of economic growth and expansion just as well as in times of economic decline. More generally, a rise in real wages and an increase in labor's share of national income could offset the influence on income distribution of any increased concentration of landholdings.

Each process can be adduced for many parts of China. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, the increase in the demand for rice in the Lower Yangzi drew the capital of wealthy landowners into land reclamation projects in the Dongting Lake area of Hunan. Immigrant households supplied much of the labor for reclaiming and later for tenanting this land.^[21] This process contributed to a relatively high degree of land concentration and tenancy in the area, which persisted into the 1930s.^[22] Similar kinds of investments occurred in the Jiangnan area and in some of the more commercialized areas of the North China Plain. During the last half of the Qing, cultivated area increased by roughly half, much of it through investments such as these.^[23]

[19] John L. Buck, Land Utilization in China: Statistical Volume (Chicago, 1937), p. 404. If the loans extended by landlords and other wealthy households were larger than average, they may have been more important than their percentage of the total number of loans otherwise suggests.

[20] John R. Shepherd, "Rethinking Tenancy: Spatial and Temporal Variation in Land Ownership Concentration in Late Imperial and Republican China," Comparative Studies in Society and History 30.3 (July 1988): 403–31.

[21] See Peter C. Perdue, Exhausting the Earth (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).

[22] According to the National Land Commission survey, 47.8 percent of cultivated area in Hunan was rented. The high degree of land rental and estimates of the concentration of cultivated holdings provided in Table 6.3 suggest a highly concentrated land ownership.

[23] By the early twentieth century, if not before, much of the potential for expanding cultivated area in China proper (excluding Manchuria) had been exhausted. In eastern Jiangsu, however, an estimated 5 million to 6 million mu of land in abandoned salt farms (or a 25 percent increase over existing cultivated area in eastern Jiangsu) was reclaimed for agricultural use. In these counties we typically find a relatively high degree of tenancy. Information on tenancy and the landholdings of land reclamation companies in the area can be found in the Ministry of Industry survey of Jiangsu for 1933. See Zhongguo Shiyebu, Guoji Maoyiju, Zhongguo shiye zhi: Jiangsu sheng (Shanghai, 1933), pp. 231–32.

There was also migration, most notably in the eighteenth century into Sichuan, in the mid-to-late nineteenth century into highly fertile areas of the Lower Yangzi depopulated by the Taiping Rebellion, and in the twentieth century into Manchuria.^[24] In each case, individuals or entire households moved into these areas to take advantage of better economic opportunities. Even without land exchanging hands, migration under these conditions can lead to an increasing concentration of landholdings (because of an increase in the number of landless households) and a rise in tenancy in the area experiencing the in-migration.^[25] In fact, one observes a higher degree of concentration of land ownership in Manchuria for the early twentieth century than in other parts of China.^[26]

The historical role of these alternative processes throughout much of China points to the shortcomings in many earlier interpretations of land concentration and tenancy in the early twentieth century. The concentration of landholdings cannot simply be viewed as the cumulative product of a single process. Rather, the degree of concentration observed in a locality at any given time needs to be seen as the legacy of several, possibly interrelated, economic/historical processes including migration, reclamation, and commercialization as well as forced land sales that may or may not have been weakened over time by other forces operating on the rural economy.^[27]

[24] On the migration to Manchuria, see Thomas R. Gottschang, "Economic Change, Disasters, and Migration: The Historical Case of Manchuria," Economic Development and Cultural Change 35.3 (Apr. 1987): 461–90.

[25] A possible reduction in concentration in the area experiencing the out-migration may have kept inequality, in the aggregate, from worsening.

[26] For a sample of villages settled after the turn of the century, Myers has found an average Gini coefficient for landholdings equal to 0.86. This is 15–20 percent higher than the average for the 47 villages cited in n. 7. See Ramon H. Myers, "Socioeconomic Change in Villages of Manchuria during the Qing and Republican Periods: Some Preliminary Findings," Modern Asian Studies 10, no. 4 (1976): 591–620. Interestingly, the Gini coefficient for villages settled before the turn of the century is not markedly less than for those settled afterward, thus suggesting the legacy of the initial pattern of settlement.

[27] One of these other forces we have in mind here is family division. Since Adam Smith, there has been a presumption that over the course of several generations family division helps to reduce the inequality of landholdings. Lavely and Wong argue that this need not be the case and demonstrate how the impact of partible succession on land concentration is influenced by both inter- and intra-landclass differences in reproductivity. See William Lavely and R. Bin Wong, "Family Division, Reproductivity, and Landholding in North China," Research Report no. 84–65, Population Studies Center, University of Michigan, Nov. 1984.

Land and Income Distribution in Rural China

Data on land distribution have long served as the key indicator of the degree of economic welfare inequality in the rural sector. Yet how accurate are landholdings as such a measure? There exist data sources from the 1930s that allow estimates of the degree of dispersion of both land and income in the rural sector. These include the survey of the National Land Commission used earlier that provides provincial-level data, and village-level surveys carried out by the South Manchurian Railway Company in North China. Although these data sources differ in a number of key respects and the latter are confined to North China, together they provide new insights into the relationship between the degree of concentration of incomes and land ownership in China's rural sector.

In estimating the degree of inequality in an economy, several important methodological questions immediately arise. These are related to the selection of the measure of economic well-being and the unit of observation (individual, family, income earner, etc.).^[28] We have selected income as our measure of well-being, although other indicators of welfare, such as consumption or expenditures, could also be used and might actually be preferable. All the income data are provided at the household level, but rather than rank households by total household income as has frequently been done, we have elected to rank them by per capita household income. In this regard, we are following Simon Kuznets, who concludes in a comparison of the two methods:

It makes little sense to talk about inequality in the distribution of income among families or households by income per family or household when the underlying units differ so much. . . . Before any analysis can be undertaken, size distributions of families or households by income per family must be converted to distributions of persons (or consumer equivalents) by size of family or household income per person (or per consumer).^[29]

Kuznets's remarks would seem to have a particular relevancy for rural China, where the range of household sizes was enormous. With many households consisting of one or two people and others including up to 20, the potential for differences in measures of inequality based on household rather than individual income or wealth is obviously large.

Before reporting provincial-level estimates of the degree of income in-

[28] These issues are discussed in R. Albert Berry, "Evidence on Relationships among Alternative Measures of Concentration: A Tool for Analysis of LDC Inequality," Review of Income and Wealth 33.4 (Dec. 1987): 417–30.

[29] Simon Kuznets, "Demographic Aspects of the Size Distribution of Income: An Exploratory Essay," Economic Development and Cultural Change 25, no. 1 (Oct. 1976): 87. See also Gautam Datta and Jacob Meerman, "Household Income or Household Income per Capita in Welfare Comparisons," Review of Income and Wealth 26, no. 4 (Dec. 1980): 401–18.

equality, we first look at the concentration of landholdings reported in the National Land Commission survey. Unfortunately, the summary report of the National Land Commission only provides a distribution of landholdings for the country as a whole (see Table 6.1). Provincial-level information, however, is provided on the distribution of operational holdings, the sum of owned and rented land that a household cultivates. The survey reports the number of households in each of 13 size categories. We have modified these data slightly to include households that did not farm, that is, had no operational holdings, and then calculated Gini coefficients for the new distributions.^[30] These estimates are provided in Table 6.3.

It is widely agreed that land rental increased access to land; thus, the distribution of operational holdings should be more equal than the distribu-

[30] Most computational formulas for the Gini coefficient based on grouped data such as these underestimate the degree of inequality because they ignore intragroup inequality. We have followed Kakwani in correcting for this, using the midpoint of each interval as an estimate of its mean. See Nanak Kakwani, "On the Estimation of Income Inequality from Grouped Observations," Review of Economic Studies 43, no. 3 (Oct. 1976): 483–92.

tion of land ownership. This is borne out by the data: the Gini coefficient for landholdings is 0.72, while that for cultivated holdings is 0.62. For a majority of provinces the Gini coefficient for operational holdings is between 0.53 and 0.60.

In general, we expect the difference between the Gini coefficient for owned and cultivated holdings to be positively correlated with the percentage of land rented; in other words, the more land that is rented out to tenants, the lower the concentration of operational holdings associated with any given level of inequality of land ownership. Since the Gini coefficient for operational holdings for the provinces of North China and the Yangzi Valley are almost the same, the greater prevalence of tenancy in the Yangzi Valley than in North China would suggest that land ownership was more widely distributed in North China than in the Yangzi Valley.^[31] The Gini coefficient for landholdings in the Yangzi was probably in excess of 0.75, while that for North China was nearer to 0.65.

But what about incomes? Were they just as concentrated as land ownership? Again drawing on data compiled by the National Land Commission, we have calculated Gini coefficients for household incomes in each of the 16 provinces. These estimates also appear in Table 6.3. Without exception, they reveal a degree of income inequality much lower than that suggested by the land data alone. For a majority of the provinces the Gini coefficient for household income was in the vicinity of 0.40–0.45, while the Gini coefficient for the entire sample is 0.46.^[32] These estimates are 35 percent to 40 percent lower than what the provincial Gini coefficients for landholdings probably are. Geographically, the degree of income dispersion appears to be slightly below the national average in the more densely populated areas of the Yangzi and South China and modestly higher in the North and Northwest.

Data from North China

In a number of respects these estimates are not entirely satisfactory. On the one hand, it is not exactly clear from the summary report which measure of income was used: net or gross, cash or total (which includes cash income plus income in kind). C. Robert Roll has argued that households probably re-

[31] Approximately 45 percent of land was rented out in the Yangzi region, as compared to 15–20 percent in North China. These estimates are based on Tudi Weiyuanhui, Quanguo tudi diaocha , pp. 26–27.

[32] In calculating the Gini coefficient for the entire sample, we have pooled the data by taking a weighted average of the percentage of households in each province in each size category, using as weights the percentage of the total rural population in each province. Rural population estimates are based on provincial population estimates contained in Dwight H. Perkins, Agricultural Development in China, 1368–1968 (Chicago, 1969), p. 212, and estimates of the percentage of population classified as rural are provided in Wu Baosan, Zhongguo guomin suode, 1933 nian (Shanghai, 1947), 1:151.

ported their total net income, yet the difficulty of accurately estimating all in-kind income and production expenditure cannot be underestimated. On the other hand, if household incomes and family size are systematically related, the distribution of household income may provide a misleading indicator of income distribution on a per capita basis. From a welfare perspective, it is the latter distribution with which we are concerned. Again, we need to know how the distributions for household income and household income on a per capital basis are related to each other.

Three village surveys undertaken by the South Manchurian Railway Company in 1936 in Hebei Province provide important information on each of these questions.^[33] These surveys are unique because they enumerate every household in the village and give information on both in-kind and cash incomes and expenditures, thus allowing comprehensive estimates of household incomes.^[34] The village data allow us to compare the degree of inequality in the distribution of assets and income by households and in per capita terms. The difference between these two measures of village inequality can be combined with the information in Table 6.3 to make a tentative estimate of the degree of income inequality in rural China at the household level on a per capita basis, which can then be compared with estimates for other low-income countries. These surveys also provide important clues as to why the concentration of incomes observed in Table 6.3 was so much lower than that suggested by the data on land ownership alone.

The three villages selected by the South Manchurian Railway Company for detailed examination include Michang Village in Fengrun County, Dabeiguan in Pinggu County, and Qianlianggezhuang (Lianggezhuang for short) in Changli County. All three were located in northeastern Hebei within 100 kilometers of each other and were less than several hundred kilometers from Tianjin. Despite some obvious similarities, there were marked differences between the villages, some of which are captured in Table 6.4.

Dabeiguan was a relatively poor, only moderately commercialized farming village that was first settled in the early Ming dynasty (1368–1644). At the time of the survey it was made up of 98 households and had a total population of 601. Much of its acreage was devoted to food crop production

[33] See Minami Manshu Tetsudo Kabushiki Kaisha, Kito Noson Jittai Chosahan, Dainiji kito noson jittai chosa hokokuso: tokeihen ; Dai ichiban: Heikoku ken ; Dai sanban: Hojun ; Dai yonban: Shorei ken (Dairen, 1937). These surveys are part of an enormous collection of materials on social and economic life in China compiled by the South Manchurian Railway Company during the late 1930s and early 1940s. For an introduction to these materials, see Philip C. C. Huang, Peasant Economy .

[34] An earlier estimate of the degree of income inequality in a North China village made by Marc Blecher suffers in both regards because it is based on a stratified sample in which larger farms are overrepresented and because household income is measured simply by the gross agricultural output of each household. See Marc Blecher, "Income Distribution in Small Rural Chinese Communities," China Quarterly 68 (Dec. 1976): 795–816.

for village consumption, although approximately 15 percent of the total cultivated area was used to grow cotton and sesame primarily for market sale. Slightly less than 15 percent of agricultural output was marketed. Animal husbandry represented an important, but perhaps declining, sideline for some households.^[35]

Every household in the village was engaged in agriculture, and all but five actually owned some land. Farms averaged almost 25 mu , or 1.67 hectares (15 mu equals 1 hectare). Only five percent of the land in the village, however, exchanged hands through the rental market. In contrast, the labor market

[35] According to the preface to the survey, population pressure had reportedly begun to crowd out animal husbandry. Some households (the poorer ones) were forced to abandon animal husbandry altogether, whereas others switched to rearing smaller animals.

was very active. Villagers employed substantial amounts of labor from inside and outside the village on an annual and seasonal basis. Villagers also worked outside the village primarily on a daily basis. In this regard, the labor market appears to have been the primary mechanism through which households offset imbalances in resource endowments. On the whole, Dabeiguan was a small net exporter of labor. In all likelihood because of more lucrative opportunities outside the village, Daibeguan was, at the same time, a net lender of capital.

Michang, in contrast, typifies the richer, more highly commercialized villages of North China. It was made up of 114 households and had a total population of 753. Because of its rail links to the region's major urban centers, agriculture had become highly specialized in the course of the early twentieth century. In the process, farm households replaced the cultivation of basic foodgrains, like sorghum and millet, with cash crops, such as cotton, and purchased large amounts of grain from outside sources. By the mid-1930s more than a third of the cultivated area was in cotton, and almost half of agricultural output was marketed. Commercial fertilizers also began to be widely used and represented a significant expenditure item for almost all farming households.

Although agriculture was the primary source of income in Michang, 15 households were engaged solely in nonagricultural activities. An additional 22 households were engaged in nonfarm sidelines. These activities included peddling, carpentry, food processing, and local government service. Three households reported no income and were classified by surveyors as "beggar households." A total of 19 village members had also migrated (primarily to Tangshan and Tianjin, and mostly as shopkeepers) and, through remittances, represented a key source of income for some households.

Cash-cropping and the commercialization of the local economy substantially increased productivity and the demand for labor.^[36] Only a portion of this increase, however, was accommodated by an increase in labor supply from within the village, and Michang looked increasingly outside its boundaries for labor. In the 1930s, Michang was a net importer of labor. This was complemented by a very active land rental market, in which almost a third of all land exchanged hands. Yet most of this exchange was due to villagers cultivating land owned by village outsiders (absentee landlords). Within Michang, households cultivated most of the land they owned. Unlike Debeiguan, Michang was a net borrower of capital.

Situated on the Bei-Ning Railroad, Lianggezhuang was also a highly commercialized village, although more closely tied to Manchuria than to North

[36] The annual labor requirement for cotton, for example, was 12 days per mu , or double the requirement for grain crops. The demand for marketing and auxiliary services also increased labor demand.

China. With 101 families and a total population of 574, it was slightly smaller than either Michang or Dabeiguan. Through the first three decades of the twentieth century, Manchuria had provided a rapidly expanding market for farm products and employment for some village members. Lianggezhuang's chief agricultural export was pears. Much of the profit from these exports was reportedly reinvested in land, and by the 1930s almost one third of total acreage was in pear orchards.

With the establishment of the puppet state of Manchoukuo in 1932, however, exports and seasonal migration were sharply curtailed. These difficulties were further compounded by a series of poor harvests. In 1936 pear output contributed only one-seventh to the gross value of agricultural output despite representing almost a third of cultivated area. This had profound ramifications for the labor market, for this one crop had formerly absorbed over one half of agricultural household labor and had drawn in much labor from outside the village.^[37] As these opportunities dried up, many villagers now sought short-term work in the nearby prefectural capital, and Lianggezhuang actually became a net exporter of labor. Reflecting these difficulties, in 1936 agriculture contributed only 58 percent of total gross village income.

What can we say about the distribution of land and income in these three villages, and how does it compare to the aggregate estimates for Hebei? Table 6.5 reports Gini coefficients for asset holdings (land, draft animals, and labor power) and incomes, both on a household and household per capita basis for each of the three villages. Mean values of each variable are reported in parentheses.^[38] In Michang and Lianggezhuang average landholdings were smaller, and land ownership much more concentrated, than in Dabeiguan. The same is also true of household ownership of draft animals. In the two more highly commercialized villages the degree of concentration of landholdings was 20–25 percent higher than in Dabeiguan. The average Gini coefficient for the three villages was 0.70, only slightly higher than the average (0.65) for 32 villages also surveyed in Hebei in 1936.^[39] In all three villages, however, land rental helped to equalize access to land among households; this effect is most pronounced in Michang and Lianggezhuang, where a third and a half of the land were leased to tenants, respectively. In Michang, for example, the Gini coefficient for landholdings was 0.75, while that for operational holdings was 0.55; in Lianggezhuang the coefficients were 0.75 and 0.53, respectively. The mean operational holding in Michang was also much larger than the mean landholding because of the substantial

[37] This was the opinion of the surveyors as expressed in the preface to the survey.

[38] Here, and throughout this paper, we apply the term "per capita" to data on landholdings, incomes and other variables that we obtain by dividing household figures for these variables by the number of persons per household.

[39] See Mantetsu chosa geppo 18, no. 1 (1939): 39–73 and 18, no. 4 (1939): 21–31.

holdings of absentee landlords. In Lianggezhuang the situation was the exact opposite, because a quarter of the land was rented out to nonvillagers, who were not included in the survey.

Table 6.5 also shows Gini coefficients for household income and household income on a per capita basis.^[40] The Gini coefficients for household income are very consistent with the estimate suggested by the National Land Commission data for Hebei. As reported in Table 6.3, the Gini coefficient for the distribution of rural incomes in Hebei was 0.46. We also observe that for two of the three villages net household incomes were much more evenly distributed than cash incomes.

Yet for reasons spelled out above, it is the distribution of household income on a per capita basis that concerns us. And here we observe in every case a much lower degree of inequality on a per capita basis than on a household basis: Michang, 0.488 versus 0.391; Lianggezhuang, 0.409 versus 0.346;

[40] The details of the income calculations are included in a lengthy appendix available from either author on request.

and Dabeiguan, 0.436 versus 0.349. The average difference between the Gini coefficients is 0.08. If this relationship held throughout the province, it would suggest a Gini coefficient for per capita rural household incomes in Hebei of 0.38, that is, 0.46 – 0.08. We also note that when measured on a per capita basis, the differences in the degree of income inequality between the villages are very small. Moreover, although overall inequality was slightly higher in Michang, average per capita income was also more than a fifth higher than in either of the other villages. With differences in consumption expenditure per capita even smaller, much of the higher income in Michang obviously took the form of higher savings.

Several questions immediately arise: (1) why is the inequality of incomes on a per capita basis much lower than the inequality at the household level? (2) why are household incomes distributed so much more equitably than landholdings? and (3) what diluted the influence of the much higher inequality in landholdings in Michang and Lianggezhuang and produced a dispersion in incomes similar to that observed for Dabeiguan?

Until the recent work of Kuznets, the influence of the size distribution of households on income disparities was neglected. Most estimates of income inequality were calculated using income per household. Since households differ in size, this can provide a very misleading indicator of the degree of dispersion of incomes on a per capita basis. In general, family size and family incomes are highly positively correlated. In the three villages we examined, the households with the highest incomes are usually those with ten or more members. The most obvious reason for this is that larger families typically have more members of working age who can add to the household's income. In China these households were typically extended, multigenerational households that had not recently divided.

If incomes increase more than proportionally with household size, the dispersion of incomes on a per capita basis will actually exceed their dispersion on a per household basis. But this is typically not the case; rather, incomes increase less than proportionally, and family size and per capita incomes are negatively associated. Indeed, some of the poorest households on a per capita basis in these villages are among those identified as having the highest total household incomes. Although it need not always be the case, under such conditions the dispersion of household incomes on a per capita basis can be less than that for total household incomes. This is in fact what we observe for all three villages.^[41]

[41] The tendency for the dispersion of household incomes on a per capita basis to be lower than their dispersion on a household basis appears to be much more common for developing than for developed countries. For a sample of six developing countries (Colombia, India, Malaysia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan), the average difference between the Gini coefficient for household incomes or expenditures and the same measure on a per capita basis was 0.05. The largest difference was observed for Malaysia, where the Gini coefficient for households ranked by incomes was 0.52, whereas that for households ranked on a per capita basis was 0.43. The data also suggest a slightly larger difference between the two measures in rural than in urban areas. These estimates are taken from Pravin Visaria, "Demographic Factors and the Distribution of Income: Some Issues," in International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, Economic and Demographic Change: Issue for the 1980's (Helsinki, 1979), 1:289–320; and Berry, "Evidence on Relationships." On the relationship more generally between household size and income distribution, see Simon Kuznets, "Size of Households and Income Disparities," Research in Population Economics 3 (1981): 1–40.

The second and third questions concerning the link between land ownership and income earnings benefit from a brief examination of what we mean by income. Conceptually, income can be thought of as a stream of earnings generated by all factors of production owned by an individual or household (current technology defining what is and is not a factor of production). In a primarily agrarian economy, the key factors of production are land, labor, and capital (the last including such things as farm implements and draft animals). Letting H, L , and K represent these three factors, and r, w , and t their returns, for household i , income, Y , is figured by the equation

where Hⁱ , Kⁱ , and Lⁱ denote household i 's ownership of land, labor, and capital. A household's income, therefore, is positively related to how much of each factor it owns and to the return to each factor.

Yet where do r, w , and t come from? The returns to the various factors of production depend on the nature of the rural economy—most importantly, existing production technology, factor proportions, and the workings of markets or exchange. If all households had access to the same production technology, but each household simply used the resources that it possessed, rⁱ , wⁱ , and tⁱ would differ among households, with the return to each factor negatively correlated with its relative availability within the household. Exchange alters all this. Allowing households to buy and sell the services of the factors of production frees them from their particular endowments and allows them access to all factors of production within the village. Exchange effectively coordinates all households' demands for and supplies of all factors of production, so that the return to each factor is determined by its relative availability within the village rather than within the household.^[42] That is, r, w , and t would be the same across households.

Looking at incomes from this perspective, it becomes clear why many observers thought income distribution within China was highly unequal. For a majority of rural households agriculture was the primary source of income, only modestly supplemented by income from subsidiary activities, such as

[42] If factors are mobile, their returns will depend on relative availability within an even wider marketing area, not just availability within the village.

handicrafts. Thus, household incomes in the rural sector were systematically tied to income from agriculture and land ownership. At the same time, farming in China was highly labor-intensive; the land-labor ratio, in fact, was one of the lowest in the world. Modern inputs into agriculture had yet to be introduced in any quantity. As a result, the marginal productivity of labor, the level of rural wages, and the percentage of output captured by labor tended to be low relative to the return to land. A direct result of the limited off-farm opportunities, low relative returns to labor, and high concentration of land ownership was an unequal distribution of rural incomes.^[43]

Yet perceptions were that income inequality was becoming more severe. Why? On the one hand, both Chinese and Western observers believed that land ownership had become much more concentrated; on the other hand, they observed a falling land-labor ratio and associated with that a marked decline in wages relative to land rents.^[44] This fall was only exacerbated by the imperfectly working factor markets, which prevented households from rationally redistributing factors among themselves.^[45] A concurrent decline in off-farm employment opportunities, which small farm households disproportionately relied on, was also perceived to have occurred.^[46] What all this seemed to mean was that landowners, who were becoming an even smaller minority, appeared to be capturing an increasing percentage of the net product of the rural sector.

[44] Estimates by Dwight H. Perkins suggest that the land-labor ratio in China proper declined by roughly 15 percent between the 1890s and the 1930s. See Agricultural Development in China , pp. 212 and 236.

[45] See Philip C. C. Huang, Peasant Economy , esp. chaps. 4–12.

[46] See, for example, Fan Baichuan, "Zhongguo shougongye zai waiguo zibenzhuyi qinruhou de zaoyu he mingyun," Lishi yanjiu 3 (1962): 88–115.

The evidence on land and income distribution presented earlier belies much of this story. To see why, recall that income distribution depends not only on the distribution of land ownership but also on the distribution of the other factors of production in the rural economy, most importantly, labor power and, to a lesser extent, draft animals and other forms of capital. It also depends on the returns to these factors and on the correlation of factor ownership across households. A high correlation of landholdings with ownership of other factors of production would only reinforce the influence of a high concentration of landholdings on incomes. The distributive impact of a high degree of concentration in land ownership could, however, be partly or entirely offset by the effects of more even distribution of ownership for other factors of production, by a rise in the share of total income earned by other factors, or by a weak or inverse correlation between ownership of different productive factors by different households.

In Table 6.5 we observe that labor power (and therefore income from labor) was indeed much more evenly distributed among households than was land. The Gini coefficients for labor power per household were 0.33, 0.32, and 0.24, for Michang, Lianggezhuang, and Dabeiguan, respectively. Draft animal ownership, on the other hand, was about as unequally distributed as landholdings in the three villages.

Yet the strength of this influence clearly depends on the portion of output that labor captures. If labor power is evenly distributed among households, but the portion of output going to labor is relatively small, the equalizing effect would itself be modest. In rural North China, land captured about half of agricultural output, labor a third, and the remainder represented the return to draft animals and other forms of farm capital.^[47] These estimates are misleading, however, because agriculture was not the only source of income. In all three villages there were a variety of sidelines that offered subsidiary sources of incomes that primarily represented returns to labor. Our calculations, based on the three village surveys, show that land rents (including rents attributed to owner-operated farm land as well as cash or in-kind payments by tenants to landlords) amounted to about a third of total village income, while labor incomes accounted for more than half of all income.

Intervillage differences along these same lines helped to diminish the influence of the much higher concentration of landholdings on incomes in Michang and Lianggezhuang. In Michang, land rents averaged between 4 and 5 yuan per mu , while a long-term laborer could expect to earn 45–50 yuan in cash, plus an in-kind component of perhaps equal value. In Dabeiguan, by contrast, land rents were modestly less, at 3–3.50 yuan per mu , but wages paid long-term agricultural laborers were only about half the rate in Michang. In

[47] These estimates are taken from Loren Brandt, "Farm Household Behavior, Factor Markets, and the Distributive Consequences of Commercialization in Early Twentieth-Century China," Journal of Economic History 47.3 (September 1987): 731.

Lianggezhuang, land rents averaged even less, between 2 and 2.50 yuan per mu , while wages (cash component only) paid long-term agricultural laborers were 30–35 yuan . The same relationship is reflected in output shares; the share of agricultural output going to land in Michang and Lianggezhuang was roughly 40 percent, while in Dabeiguan it exceeded 50 percent.^[48] The significantly higher return to labor relative to land in both Michang and Lianggezhuang helped to reduce the influence of a more concentrated land ownership in these villages and produce a degree of income inequality not much different from that in Dabeiguan.

Nonagricultural activities and remittances played a similar role. In both Michang and Lianggezhuang, 40 households were engaged in nonagricultural activities either as a sideline or on a full-time basis.^[49] From both villages there was also substantial out-migration—37 household members from Michang, and 19 from Lianggezhuang had migrated—and the out-migrants in turn typically remitted a healthy portion of their earnings back to the villages. The higher the percentage of income generated from nonagricultural sources and received in the form of remittances, the weaker the influence of land concentration on the overall dispersion of incomes. In Lianggezhuang, nonagricultural activities and remittances produced 42 percent of gross household income, while in Michang they amounted to 17.4 percent; in Dabeiguan they totaled only 6.1 percent.

Finally, Table 6.6 reveals that the correlation between land ownership and the other factors of production was also much weaker in Michang and Lianggezhuang than in Dabeiguan. The same is also true for the relationship between labor power and draft animal ownership. While factor ownership was positively correlated, the probability that a household with substantial landholdings simultaneously had more than average labor power and draft animals was significantly lower in either Michang or Lianggezhuang than in Dabeiguan. This partially reflects the higher degree of specialization in the local economy of the first two. As a result, even though land was distributed more unequally in Michang and Lianggezhuang than in Dabeiguan, the

[48] Average land rents were computed from detailed land contract information provided by the survey. Land's share was then calculated by dividing average land rent by average output per unit of land.

[49] The percentage of households in Michang and Lianggezhuang engaged in nonagricultural activity on a full-time basis (3.5 percent and 7.4 percent, respectively) was low compared to that in other North China villages. The average for 30 villages examined by the South Manchurian Railway Company was 13.7 percent. In a number of localities, 20 percent or more of households was classified solely as nonagricultural. These include Macun in Huailu County, 21.8 percent; Zhongliangshan in Changli County, 26.8 percent; Huzhang in Ninghe County, 31.2 percent; and Dongjiao, located just outside Shijiazhuang, 46.8 percent (see Huang, Peasant Economy , pp. 314–20). In a sample of 22 villages in southern Manchuria, 16 percent of all labor (not households) was classified as nonagricultural; see Kokumuin Jitsugyobu Rinji Sangyo Chosakyoku, Kotoku gannendo noson jittai chosa , 4 vols. (Changchun, 1936).

superior market access and non-farm employment opportunities available to residents of Michang and Lianggezhuang produced distributive outcomes that displayed no more inequality than we observe in Dabeiguan.

These calculations show, then, that the distribution of landholdings can be a very misleading indicator of the degree of income inequality in the rural economy. There is no direct line of causality running from higher concentration of landholdings to a higher concentration of income. What is true for several villages at a single time is probably true for a single village over a long period of time. Unfortunately, we do not have earlier data on distribution for these villages, and so the origins of the higher concentration of landholdings in Michang and Lianggezhuang remain a bit of a mystery. Nevertheless, even if landownership in the latter two villages became more concentrated, no widening of income differentials can be inferred.

Income Distribution in China in a Comparative Perspective

If household-level data for our small sample of North China villages are an accurate indication of the difference between the Gini coefficient for household incomes and household incomes on a per capita basis in other parts of

the country—the Gini coefficient for the rural sector as a whole was probably in the vicinity of 0.38.^[50] What tentative conclusions can we draw about the degree of inequality in the rural sector and China more generally on the basis of these data? In other words, how does the distribution of incomes in China compare with that in other low-income countries? Are there reasons to believe that incomes in rural China were exceptionally unequal? Given recent suggestions in the People's Republic of China that the degree of rural inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, be controlled within 0.30 to 0.40, perhaps not.^[51]

Although much more work is required before these questions can be answered exhaustively, some comments are in order. Ideally, we would like to compare the distribution of income observed for China with that estimated for other low-income countries in the 1930s. Short of this, we would like to compare our estimate with contemporary estimates for low-income countries similar in key respects to the China of the 1930s. India is an obvious candidate. Comparisons such as these are hampered by data limitations, however.

On the one hand, estimates of the degree of dispersion of rural incomes are almost always for households rather than households on a per capita basis. As we argued earlier, the latter is the preferred basis for measuring the distribution of economic welfare. Unless one is willing to assume that the influence of the size distribution of households on income distribution is constant over time and space, comparisons on a household basis can be misleading.

With this caveat in mind, in Table 6.7 we report Gini coefficients for rural household incomes in several Asian countries. And here we observe a degree of dispersion very similar to that estimated for China. Only in the case of Taiwan, which after World War II benefited from an income-leveling land reform, is it consistently markedly lower. Moreover, for nine of the 16 provinces that we provide estimates for (see Table 6.3), the degree of concentration compares even more favorably. In light of this finding, it seems highly unlikely that inequality was rising over time; if it was, extrapolation would imply a degree of concentration of incomes before the turn of the century that would be considered exceptionally low by international standards.

[50] This estimate was obtained by subtracting the average difference between the Gini coefficient for household incomes and household incomes on a per capita basis for the three Hebei villages from the Gini coefficient for the pooled sample in Table 6.3. One indication that in the aggregate household incomes on a per capita basis were more evenly distributed than household incomes is that cultivated area per household on a per capita basis was more evenly distributed than cultivated area per household. This is reflected in data provided by Buck on the size distribution of farms. The fact that Buck oversampled larger farms is not a point here. While the largest farms were almost 20 times larger than the smallest, on a per capita basis the difference was only one third of this. The same is true for data on land ownership. These relationships also hold separately for each of the eight regions Buck surveyed. See Buck, Land Utilization in China: Statistical Volume , pp. 289, 291, 300.

[51] "Nongcun you meiyou liangji fenbu?" Banyuetan 22 (1987): 20–21.

On the other hand, the few estimates that we have for the dispersion of household incomes on a per capita basis are for the rural and urban sectors combined, while our estimate for China is for the rural sector alone. This is not as great a problem as at first it might seem. In the 1930s, the rural sector—the focus of the National Land Commission survey—constituted between 85 percent and 90 percent of the entire population. The urban sector, although growing at a rate of 2–3 percent per annum, was still very small. The critical question is, how does the addition of data for household incomes in the expanding urban sector influence our overall assessment of income distribution in the Chinese economy? Is there any reason to believe that the distribution for the entire economy differs markedly from that for the rural sector alone?

It was once widely believed that income distribution tends to worsen initially with the growth of the modern/urban sector. Kuznets cites two primary reasons for this belief: (1) a tendency to pay substantially higher wages in the modern/urban sector than in the rural sector and (2) an increasing concentration of capital in the modern/urban sector.^[52] More recent work on a host of countries casts some doubt on this relationship. Nevertheless, for China Kuzent's hypothesis would seem to imply that incomes were more concentrated nationally than they were in the rural sector.

Data on the distribution of incomes in the urban sector presently do not exist. Nonetheless, it seems to us that any upward revision to the estimates obtained separately for the rural sector would actually be relatively modest. Despite the absolute doubling of China's urban population in the early twentieth century, it still amounted to no more than 10–15 percent of the total. As for incomes, it is important to remember here the small size of China's modern sector, almost all of which was located in the cities. Estimates by Ta-chung Liu and Kung-chia Yeh suggest that even as late as the mid-1930s the modern sector constituted no more than 6–8 percent of the gross domestic product.^[53] Because agriculture's contribution to total GDP was two thirds and rural households earned an additional 20–25 percent of their income from nonfarm sources, the percentage of national income going to the urban population could not have been much more than 20 percent and was probably slightly less.^[54] Moreover, an examination of budgetary surveys for

[52] Simon Kuznets, "Economic Growth and Income Inequality," American Economic Review 45 (Mar. 1955): 1–28.

[53] Ta-chung Liu and Kung-chia Yeh, The Economy of the Chinese Mainland (Princeton, 1965), p. 66.

[54] Assuming that 10 percent of income from agriculture went to absentee landlords residing in urban areas (based on the assumptions that 35 percent of land was rented, 60 percent by absentee landlords, and that rental payments constituted 45 percent of output on rented land), then 60 percent of total gross domestic product would have been going to rural households in the form of income from farming. If we add to this the income earned by farming households from nonagricultural activities—estimated by Buck to have been approximately 15 percent of total household income—plus the income earned by the 10–15 percent of the rural population classified as nonagricultural (under the assumption that their average incomes equaled that of the farming population), the percentage of total income going to the urban sector would have been roughly 1 - {((0.90*0.67) / 0.85) / 0.125} = 0.165, or 16.5 percent. With slightly in excess of 10 percent of the population classified as urban, the ratio of average urban-to-rural incomes would have been approximately 1.5 to 1.

working-class households in such cities as Shanghai, Wuxi, and Tianjin reveals a level of per capita income very similar to that observed for the rural sector.^[55] This is consistent with empirical work of Thomas B. Wiens, who found that "despite considerable regional variation in the monetary wage levels of farm laborers and industrial workers in various industries . . . nationally . . . farm wages appear to be slightly below the level of wages of the least skilled urban occupations, as might be expected."^[56]

Although examples can be provided of accumulation of great wealth by some Chinese families, the above considerations lead us to believe that the Gini coefficient for household incomes on a per capita basis for all of China was probably not much in excess of 0.40. How does this compare to that for other countries? In Table 6.7, we report estimates of the Gini coefficients for the distribution of household incomes on a per capita basis for several countries. The sample is small, but the degree of concentration of incomes in China does not appear to be high by comparison.

Finally, what can we say about the concentration of incomes and landholdings in the aggregate? Excluding the holdings of absentee landlords, the Gini coefficient for rural landholdings was 0.72. Making allowances for these landholdings by assuming an average holding of 100 mu suggests a Gini coefficient for rural landholdings in the vicinity of 0.80. This, of course, excludes urban landholdings, which, by all indications, were even more concentrated, implying a still higher degree of concentration. Compared to the Gini coefficient for incomes, it becomes obvious that even in a primarily agrarian economy like China's, the link between land concentration and income distribution is tenuous at best.

Summary

In this paper we have reexamined the links between land concentration and income distribution in rural China. From our perspective, much of the conventional wisdom regarding distribution in late nineteenth- and early

[55] See Bureau of Social Affairs, City Government of Shanghai, Shanghaishi gongren shenghuo chengdu (Shanghai, 1934); Bureau of Statistics, Ministry of Industry, Wuxi gongren shenghuofei ji qi zhishu (Nanjing, 1935); H. N. Feng, "An Enquiry into the Family Budget of Handicraftsmen in Tientsin, 1927–28," Quarterly Journal of Economics and Statistics 1, no. 3 (Sept. 1932).

[56] Thomas B. Wiens, "The Microeconomics of Peasant Economy: China, 1920–40" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1973), p. 169.

twentieth-century China is badly in need of reexamination. Certainly on the basis of the exploratory examination we have carried out, the views of Tawney and many other observers now seem very difficult to sustain. The many questions that do remain can only be answered through more detailed empirical work of the kind we have attempted here.

Income distribution in rural China has always been a highly charged issue. Perhaps inevitably, views on the subject are difficult to divorce from individual perceptions of the events leading up to and including the 1949 Communist takeover. Yet to say that incomes were no more concentrated—perhaps even less so—than they were in other low-income countries is not, of course, to deny that there was extreme poverty in China or that the number of people living on the margin of subsistence might have possibly increased during the early twentieth century. Given that between the 1890s and 1930s the Chinese population expanded by almost 125 million, an increase in the absolute number of poverty-stricken people can be reconciled almost as easily with the view that incomes became less concentrated as it can be with the view that income distribution worsened. Nonetheless, once we free ourselves from the established paradigm of a secular worsening of inequality and begin to entertain notions of more complicated behavior for land and income distribution, it will be easier to analyze objectively the long-term evolution of the Chinese economy, including the post-1949 changes in the rural sector.

Seven
Farming, Sericulture, and Peasant Rationality in Wuxi County in the Early Twentieth Century

Lynda S. Bell

Peasant decision making is a subject of interest to a wide range of social science theorists as well as policy planners. A compelling reason for this interest is that in the third world, improving the productive capacity of the rural sector is an important component of development. Not only is a larger food supply necessary to support a growing population of industrial workers, but peasants must have improved standards of living so that they can transform themselves into investors and consumers to support fledgling industry. Therefore, understanding how and why peasants decide production and resource-allocation issues has become an important theme in economic decision theory.

Within this context, there has been a debate about whether or not peasants behave rationally. For example, Samuel Popkin has argued vehemently in favor of the idea, stating that peasants constantly take risks to improve their profit-making potential. This is a purist approach to the issue of rationality, and makes no concessions to other circumstances that may affect the peasant's decision-making processes.^[1] However, many economists who study peasant economies have come to accept a slightly modified view of peasant rationality. Rather than seeing peasants as pure profit maximizers, they observe that even when markets are well developed and functioning

[1] Samuel Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979). Popkin argues specifically against James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, 1976). Scott claimed that peasants operate according to the principle of safety first and that patron-client ties figure prominently in peasants' efforts to avoid risk. Scott's work was influenced by the earlier social theorist Karl Polanyi, who made the important point that social institutions other than the marketplace greatly affect peasant decision making in precapitalist societies. See Scott; Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York, 1944).

smoothly, peasants often lack the education and information necessary to take full advantage of them. Moreover, peasants also face the constraints of environment, low land-labor ratios, adverse land tenure relationships, and low levels of technological development.^[2]

Under these circumstances, the concerns of most peasants involve not only profit maximization but also the satisfaction of the immediate consumption demands of all household members. To accomplish this second goal, peasants often work at many sorts of supplementary tasks in addition to their principal crop-producing activity, a strategy that spreads risk and provides additional household income. Perhaps the best way to describe this behavior in the language of economics is to say that peasant families act simultaneously as both profit-maximizing producers, or firms, and income-maximizing consumers. Consequently, individual peasant households sometimes display behavior that in their role as producers could be considered irrational, since their supplementary activities often bring far fewer returns per unit of labor than prevailing market wages in agriculture. However, if there are a number of institutional and environmental constraints at work and satisfaction of basic consumption needs can be fulfilled in no other way, adopting such behavior helps to maximize the total real and future income of the family as a whole and become a consumer-specific form of economic rationality.

As described here, my analysis builds on the work of A. V. Chayanov and of Philip Huang, who uses Chayanov's arguments to elaborate a model of China's long-term development. Because Huang believes that one of the principal characteristics of China's economy in the late imperial period was diminishing returns to labor, he calls his model "economic involution," or alternatively, "involutionary growth," terms meant to convey the importance of increasing labor intensification and the propensity for per capita incomes to stagnate even as total output increased. Although I cannot fully address here all the issues raised by the concept of involution, I should note that I follow both Chayanov and Huang in my analysis of peasant decision making.^[3]

[2] Michael Lipton, "The Theory of the Optimizing Peasant," Journal of Development Studies 4, no. 3 (April 1968): 327–51.

[3] A. V. Chayanov's main works are Peasant Farm Organization and "On the Theory of Noncapitalist Economic Systems," both translated and edited by Daniel Thorner, Basile Kerblay, and R. E. F. Smith, in A. V. Chayanov on the Theory of the Peasant Economy (Homewood, Ill., 1966). For an excellent summary of Chayanov's arguments, see Mark Harrison, "Chayanov and the Economics of the Russian Peasantry," Journal of Peasant Studies 2.4 (July 1975): 389–417. Philip C. C. Huang has written two books, The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (Stanford, 1985) and The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350–1988 (Stanford, 1990) advancing his argument on involution. I will discuss the pros and cons of Huang's concept of involution at much greater length in a book manuscript now in preparation.

Specifically, I use Chayanov's idea that the producer-consumer dualism of peasant households affects their approach to both labor allocation and marketing activity. In my view, however, this dualism did not prevent some Chinese peasants from introducing innovative production techniques or from achieving higher levels of consumption; for this reason, the term involution used by Huang to describe the late imperial economy may be misleading, seeming to connote an inevitable process of universal, inward-looking decline. Nevertheless, I do share Huang's view that the producer-consumer dualism of peasant households precluded substantial gains in material welfare for the vast majority of Chinese peasants by the early twentieth century. Under conditions of declining land-labor ratios coupled with little technological change, most Chinese peasants approached markets as vehicles to improve their short-term consumption needs and found no leeway to pursue the expanded circulation and accumulation of capital that could have led to innovative long-term investment.

In this chapter, I will present early twentieth-century evidence from the Lower Yangzi county of Wuxi that supports this producer-consumer view of peasant rationality. I shall show that Wuxi peasants engaged in sericulture as a form of supplementary-income-earning activity under conditions of extensive commercialization, dense population, and unfavorable land-labor ratios. Cash-cropping in mulberry has often been analyzed as a way that some rural districts increased their wealth in the early twentieth century, and I do not dispute that Wuxi was one of China's most rapidly developing counties at that time. I shall also show, however, that most peasants who produced mulberries and raised silkworms in Wuxi did so out of economic necessity, that the income per labor day earned from those activities was far smaller than for rice/wheat farming, and that it was difficult to make improvements in silk production overall as long as relatively poor peasant households were responsible for innovations in sericulture technique. For these reasons, although peasants in Wuxi behaved quite rationally, they had trouble contributing to long-term plans of silk industry leaders for the improvement of silk quality and became an important obstacle to long-term silk industry growth.

Qing Trends in Commercialization and Demographic Growth

To understand the dynamics of farming and sericulture in Wuxi in the early twentieth century, it is useful to explore trends already under way in Wuxi's local economy. Situated in the heart of the Lower Yangzi regional core, Wuxi had been experiencing a long process of commercial growth and

population increase for at least two centuries before 1900.^[4] This prior experience set the stage for the rapid spread of sericulture as a supplementary income-earning activity among Wuxi peasants.

The dynamics of Qing period commercialization in Wuxi had two parts. First of all, Wuxi became an important rice-marketing center from the Qianlong period (1736–95) onward. Second, Wuxi peasants became heavily involved in cotton cloth production and marketing to supplement the income-earning capacity of their households. I shall explore these two forms of commercial activity in turn.

During the early eighteenth century, Wuxi was well on its way to becoming a major center of rice trade and transport within the Lower Yangzi region.^[5] By the early Qianlong years, areas to the west and south of Wuxi, in Anhui and Jiangxi provinces, were experiencing grain surpluses, while areas to the southeast of Wuxi, in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, were evoling as a grain-deficit region because of escalating population growth, arable land becoming fully occupied, and regional urbanization.^[6] Under these conditions, Wuxi's strategic position on the Grand Canal, just south of its confluence with the Yangzi, and on the northeast bank of Lake Tai, an important transport link to northern Zhejiang, made the county a place where large-scale grain shipping, storage, and marketing began to take place.^[7]

At this point, state policy was also a dynamic factor, as Wuxi became an important concentration point in central China for the collection of tribute grain (caoliang ) before it was sent via the Grand Canal northward to Beijing. This had two consequences. First of all, as surcharges on tribute grain mounted and certain portions of the total tax were converted to cash equivalents, officials responsible for these levies increasingly collected them in cash.

[4] The term "Lower Yangzi regional core" is derived from G. William Skinner's influential work on economic "macroregions" in China as they developed in the late imperial period. The Lower Yangzi macroregion encompassed parts of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Anhui provinces and was one of China's richest agricultural areas from the tenth century onward. The "regional core" centered on the highly commercialized and densely populated area extending from the Shanghai-Ningbo coastal region inland to the area straddling the Jiangsu-Zhejiang-Anhui border. For a more detailed discussion of China's macroregions, see G. William Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 1977).

[5] I am indebted to Zhou Guangyuan of the Institute of Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, for help in locating several sources dealing with eighteenth-century trends and in developing an overall picture of Wuxi's early patterns in commercialization and demographic growth.

[6] Shehui Jingji Yanjiusuo, Wuxi mishi diaocha (Shanghai, 1935), preface, pp. 1–2; Dwight H. Perkins, Agricultural Development in China, 1368–1968 (Chicago, 1969), pp. 140–51.

[7] Sun Jingzhi et al., Economic Geography of the East China Region (Shanghai, Kiangsu, Anhwei, Chekiang ), published in Chinese, Nov. 1959, citation from the English translation by JPRS (Washington, D.C., 1961), pp. 4, 98; Wuxi Difangzhi Bianji Weiyuanhui, ed., Wuxi gushixuan (Wuxi, 1959), pp. 36–40.

They then purchased grain to meet the portion of the total tax still demanded in kind by the central government in Beijing. Thus, rice circulated ever more freely as a commodity for purchase and sale in various central China locales, and Wuxi emerged as a leading center for this activity.^[8] Second, the development of an extensive regional shipping network also proceeded at a faster pace as tribute grain came toward the Grand Canal via adjacent river routes from the eight central provinces responsible for providing it. Strategically placed at a regional transport hub, Wuxi took full advantage of this situation.^[9]

As commercial opportunities increased, so too did population. Estimating the precise rate of population growth in the eighteenth century is difficult because of China's methods of enumeration. In a study of Chinese population from the Ming dynasty through the mid-twentieth century, Ping-ti Ho explains that the prevailing system of population reporting in Qing times was based on the ding , a unit of taxation that originally referred to all adult males of working age. As is typical for the era, the only existing population figure for Wuxi in the early eighteenth century is a gazetteer report of 142,509 ding in 1726.^[10] Ho also points out that during the eighteenth century, the ding figures no longer bore any relation to the number of adult males in a given population, but rather had evolved over the two centuries or so of their usage into pure fiscal units corresponding only to a locale's total tax liability. On the basis of extensive examination and evaluation of such figures, Ho concludes that the ding represented "substantially less than one-half" the real population.^[11]

By the late eighteenth century, population reporting was beginning to correspond to reality more closely. Earlier in the century, the Kangxi emperor introduced a series of tax reforms referred to as tanding rudi or tanding rumu , literally, "spreading the ding into the land," with the intention of eliminating the ding system of tax accounting and instituting a tax based purely on land ownership at a permanent fixed rate.^[12] These reforms spread slowly, however, and were only brought to fruition by the Qianlong emperor in the mid 1770s, with decrees that permanently ended the ding assessment and called for an annual accounting of true population figures and real grain

[8] Harold C. Hinton, The Grain Tribute System of China (1845–1911) (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), pp. 1–15.

[9] The eight provinces responsible for tribute grain payments were Shandong, Henan, Anhui, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Hubei, and Hunan. See Hinton, Grain Tribute System , p. 7. On Wuxi's role as a transport and marketing center in this process, see Shehui Jingji Yanjiusuo, Wuxi mishi diaocha , preface, 1–2.

[10] Wuxi-Jinkui xianzhi (A gazetteer of Wuxi and Jinkui counties), 1881 edition, 8:5.

[11] Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1959 (Cambridge, 1959), p. 35.

[12] I am grateful to Chen Qiguang of the Institute of Economics in Beijing for explaining Kangxi's reforms that began in 1712; Ping-ti Ho also discusses the reforms in Studies , p. 25.

output.^[13] The effect of imperial reforms on population enumeration in Wuxi was that the revised ding figures reported for 1795 totaled 566,217, a closer measure of the true number of males within the county.^[14]

To derive population figures and to calculate a rate of demographic growth for Wuxi, I follow Ho's guidelines for the early eighteenth century and the suggestions of Chinese population expert Liang Fangzhong that male ding figures for Lower Yangzi region around the turn of the nineteenth century were approximately 53 percent of the total population.^[15] Therefore, I consider the 1726 ding figure to have been only around 30 percent of the real population, a rough estimate to achieve Ho's description of the ding as being "substantially less than one-half" the population, to arrive at an approximate population of 475,030; and following Liang, I take the 1795 ding figure to be 53 percent of the total, for an estimated population in that year of 1,068,334. This translates into an annual rate of population growth of 1.2 percent for the period 1726 to 1795.^[16] For China as a whole, Ho has estimated the rate of annual increase to have been 0.9 percent during this period.^[17] It is also useful to compare my calculations with Dwight H. Perkins's estimate that population doubled in Jiangsu from the mid-eighteenth century into the early nineteenth, a rate of increase that corresponds roughly to his national-level estimate that the country reached an all-time high in population, increasing from 200–250 million in 1750 to 400 million by the early years of the nineteenth century. When translated into an annual rate of population growth, Perkins's figures produce estimates very similar to Ho's, from 0.8–0.9 percent. Because of Wuxi's special conditions of rapid commercialization and the development of rural industry, it is possible that population there grew more quickly than either Ho's or Perkins's estimate suggests. But for lack of better population data for the early eighteenth century, it seems impossible for the moment to provide any more accurate calculations than these.^[18]

[13] Ping-ti Ho, Studies , pp. 47–48.

[14] Wuxi-Jinkui xianzhi , 8:5–6.

[15] Liang Fangzhong, Zhongguo lidai hukou, tiandi, tianfu tongji (China's dynastic statistics on household population, land, and land taxes) (Shanghai, 1980), pp. 440–41. Liang's figures are for Songjiang prefecture immediately to the east of Wuxi.

[16] Calculations follow George W. Barclay, Techniques of Population Analysis (New York, 1958), pp. 28–33, for continuous population growth.

[17] Ping-ti Ho, Studies , p. 64.

[18] Perkins, Agricultural Development , pp. 202–9. On trying to answer why Wuxi's annual rate of population growth may have been higher during the eighteenth century, studies of demographic growth conducted for various European locales offer intriguing hypotheses. The work of Franklin F. Mendels on Flanders in the eighteenth century, for example, argues that rapid commercialization and the development of rural industry altered nuptiality patterns—people married earlier because they could afford to—thus accelerating the regional rate of population growth (Industrialization and Population in Eighteenth-Century Flanders [New York, 1981]). Historians of Qing China have been interested in testing such theories for various regions of China, but the reconstruction of the demographic data is a formidable task due to the problems in population enumeration that I have discussed here. Ongoing work by James Lee, R. Bin Wong, and William Lavely promises to shed future light on China's unresolved demographic issues.

In any case, the rate of growth of Wuxi's population is not as important to the argument at hand as the degree of population density that Wuxi experienced by the end of the eighteenth century. In the 1790s, when figures on population and land had become far more reliable, Wuxi had only 1.3 mu of arable land per capita, just 0.1 hectare, or slightly more than one sixth of an acre.^[19] At the same time, as Perkins has demonstrated, there were no radically new developments occurring in agricultural technology during this period that would have led to substantial gains in grain output.^[20] Therefore, to comprehend how peasants in densely populated regions such as Wuxi continued to support themselves, we must turn to an exploration of trends in subsidiary activities designed to raise the potential earning power of the peasant household.

Significantly, it was also during the eighteenth century that gazetteer reports for Wuxi began to note the importance of mianbu or huabu , handicraft cotton cloth, which Wuxi peasants produced in order to secure additional grain supplies. A 1752 gazetteer explains how these exchange relationships operated among Wuxi peasant households:

Of five counties in Changzhou prefecture, Wuxi is the only one that does not cultivate cotton of its own; yet cotton cloth is even more important here than in the other counties. Wuxi peasants get only enough grain from their fields for three winter months' consumption. After they pay their rents, they hull the rice that is left, put some in bins, and take the rest to pawnshops to redeem their clothing. In the early spring, entire households spin and weave, making cloth to exchange for rice to eat because by then, not a single grain of their own is left. When spring planting is underway in the fifth month, they take their winter clothing back to the pawnshops in order to get more rice to eat. . . . In the

[19] Land per capita is calculated from a population figure estimated from the ding statistics for 1795 in Wuxi-Jinkui xianzhi , 8:5–6, and land statistics for the mid 1770s in Wuxi-Jinkui xianzhi , 9:1 and 10:1.

[20] Perkins, chaps. 3, 4. Perkins's main argument is that for China as a whole during the fourteenth through the twentieth centuries, grain output rose steadily, but mainly through the better use of "traditional" technology—the opening of new lands, the use of better and more extensive irrigation techniques, the introduction of double-cropping to new areas, and the use of a few new crops such as sorghum, sweet potatoes, and corn. Twentieth-century surveys show that no double-cropping of rice was attempted in Wuxi (although another form of double-cropping was achieved through planting a winter crop of wheat, which was treated as a cash crop) and that early-ripening varieties of rice were rarely used. As I shall argue below, the preferred method of supporting a burgeoning population in Wuxi seems to have been for peasants to develop various methods to earn cash income to purchase rice imported from surrounding areas.

autumn, with the slightest rainfall the sound of looms permeates the villages once again and the peasants take their cloth [to market] to exchange it for rice to eat. Although there are sometimes bad crop years in Wuxi, as long as other places have good cotton harvests, our peasants have no great difficulties.^[21]

From this passage, we can see that by the middle of the eighteenth century, Wuxi peasants had developed a complex pattern of cotton spinning and weaving, pawning of clothing items made of cotton, selling of cotton cloth, and rice buying. As commercialization proceeded and population grew, it was important for peasant families to develop methods that would adequately support their consumption demands. Although it is difficult to document the process of peasant decision making more precisely for the eighteenth century (I shall be more exact with twentieth-century data), it is likely that household labor was used more effectively by combining cotton spinning and weaving with the regular farming enterprise. Especially important was that the labor of women and children could be tapped and also that spinning and weaving could proceed during the slack agricultural periods of late fall, winter, and early spring. Even though peasants had to use relatively scarce rice resources immediately after the harvest to redeem their winter clothing and to acquire cotton, operating in this fashion must have meant that the income-earning potential of the family as a whole, or, stated another way, the "total product" of their labor, was raised. With an active and growing rice market within the county, the possibility that peasant demand for grain could be satisfied by rice imported from other areas helped to promote this particular pattern of agrarian development.^[22]

With this brief sketch of Qing period commercialization in Wuxi, I shall turn now to a discussion of changing conditions in the late nineteenth century. I shall argue that the large-scale undertaking of sericulture by Wuxi peasants at this time should be seen not only as an adaptation to the new market demand for Chinese raw silk but also as a continuation of seeking ways of supplementing household income through diversification.

Sericulture After the Taiping Rebellion

Sericulture became an attractive option for Wuxi peasants around 1870 because of two converging sets of circumstances: the "opening" of Shanghai by the British as a result of the Opium War and subsequent developments in the international silk market, and the chance for peasants to make innovative

[21] Xi-Jin shi xiaolu (A brief record of what is known about Wuxi and Jinkui counties) (Wuxi, 1752), 1:6–7.

[22] Further discussion of these developments in Xi-Jin shi xiaolu , 1:8, refers to the rice purchased by peasant households in Wuxi as kemi , literally "guest rice," meaning that this rice was coming into the county from other areas.

adaptations in their patterns of subsidiary activity following the devastation of central China in the Taiping period. I shall begin this discussion with the international situation.

In the 1840s, Shanghai became a port open to foreign trade, and an international community of foreign businessmen and Chinese merchants began to congregate there. Among the foreigners were men interested in promoting the development of machine-based spinning of silk yarn and its export to expanding silk markets in both Europe and the United States. The first modern steam-operated silk filatures, plants where this yarn was processed, were built in Shanghai in the early 1860s, with capital and equipment provided by European investors.^[23] A chronic problem plagued these early filatures, however. A marketing network to secure cocoons for filatures had not yet been established in rural areas adjacent to Shanghai. Moreover, silk filatures faced an uphill battle in establishing such a network, because they were thrown into direct competition for cocoons with well-entrenched production and marketing networks for handicraft silk products. For lack of adequate cocoon supplies, all of Shanghai's early filatures had great difficulties remaining open.^[24]

Meanwhile, just to the west of Shanghai, a domestic war of great intensity was building. In 1861, the Taiping rebels made their way to Nanjing, and a four-year period of intense warfare within the immediate environs ensued. The consequences of this war for many rural areas were devastating. Peasants and landlords alike fled the region, while many tens of thousands who stayed behind died as a result of the fighting. After the Taiping defeat in 1865, the area was badly in need of resettlement and restoration to its full productive capacity.^[25]

Because of these converging circumstances, the time was now ripe for peasants in Wuxi to act. As the Taiping period ended and peasants migrated to the area, they converted portions of former paddy land to mulberry fields and began to raise cocoons each spring for sale to newly developing Shanghai filatures. Although data for this period are insufficient to determine the precise start-up costs of these activities, we do know that members of elite society in Wuxi often encouraged this switch to sericulture. In some cases, gentry

[23] Yin Liangying, Zhongguo canye shi (A history of Chinese sericulture) (Nanjing, 1931), p. 12; E-tu Zen Sun, "Sericulture and Silk Textile Production in Ch'ing [Qing] China," in W. E. Willmott, ed., Economic Organization in Chinese Society (Stanford, 1972), pp. 103–4; Lillian M. Li, China's Silk Trade: Traditional Industry in the Modern World (Cambridge, 1981), p. 164.

[24] Yin Liangying, Zhongguo canye shi , p. 12; Wuxi Difangzhi Bianji Weiyuanhui, ed., Wuxi gushixuan , p. 41. For an extended discussion of the competition for cocoons between producers of handicraft silk and the new steam-powered filatures in Shanghai, see Lynda S. Bell, "Merchants, Peasants, and the State: The Organization and Politics of Chinese Silk Production, Wuxi County, 1870–1937" (Los Angeles, 1985), chap. 2.

[25] Li Wenzhi, "Lun Qingdai houqi Jiang-Zhe-Wan sansheng yuan Taiping Tianguo zhanlingqu tudi guanxi de bianhua," Lishi yanjiu 6 (Dec. 15, 1981): 82–86.

members bore the initial costs of mulberry purchase and early dissemination of sericulture technique. Undoubtedly, they did this in the hope that they could attract new tenants to their land with the promise of substantial cash earnings.^[26] From this point onward, sericulture replaced cotton cloth production as the primary subsidiary activity of peasant households, and Wuxi began to develop as the cocoon-marketing capital of the central China region.^[27]

Although ecologically it was possible to raise both mulberries and cocoons in Wuxi, it also became clear as sericulture developed that there were relatively higher risks there than in other locales. Spring weather in Wuxi was not quite as warm as in older sericulture areas closer to the coast and further south, and so Wuxi peasants often experienced seasons in which they lost their silkworm crops entirely to the vagaries of rapidly changing humidity, cool snaps, and the subsequent growth of incurable bacterial infections.^[28] Moreover, sericulture in Wuxi was tied directly and solely to the international market for machine-spun raw silk. None of its cocoons entered into the domestic handicraft market, making Wuxi peasants especially vulnerable to drops in the international price of raw silk and the filature closings that inevitably resulted.^[29] A kind of boom-bust atmosphere prevailed within the Wuxi cocoon market, and the risks associated with cocoon production in Wuxi were likewise relatively high.^[30]

[26] Yan Jinqing, ed., Yan Lianfang yigao (Wuxi, 1923), 10:9, Gao Jingyue and Yan Xuexi, "Wuxi zuizao de sangyuan,"' Wuxi xianbao (Aug. 20, 1980): 4; Zhang Kai, "Mantan lishishang Jiangsu de canye," Canye keji 3 (Oct. 1979): 53; Li, China's Silk Trade , pp. 131–38.

[27] On cocoon marketing in Wuxi, see Bell, "Merchants, Peasants, and the State," chap. 3.

[28] "Sican zhaiyao," Jiangnan shangwu bao 9 (Apr. 21, 1900), commercial raw materials section, p. 2; and Dierlishi Dang'anguan, file no. 3504, "Liangnianlai bensheng [Zhejiang] canzhong zhizao ji qudi jingguo gaikuang, Minguo ershinian—Minguo ershiernian," p. 4; Sun Guoqiao, "Wuxi zhidao yu yangcan shiye zhi yaodian," Nongye zhoubao 1, no. 25 (Oct. 16, 1931): 985; "Wuxi jianshi jianse," Minguo ribao , May 21, 1916, sec. 3:10; "Canxun yin yushui guoduo shousun," Minguo ribao , May 11, 1921, sec. 3:11; "Wuxi chunjian shoucheng jianse," Minguo ribao , June 5, 1921, sec. 2:8.

[29] The link between the Wuxi cocoon market and the central China filature industry is treated at length in Bell, "Merchants, Peasants, and the State," chaps. 1 and 3. For the problem of periodic filature closings, see Minami Manshu Tetsudo Kabushiki Kaisha, Shanhai Jimusho Chosashitsu (hereafter SMR, Shanghai Office), Mushaku kogyo jittai chosa hokokusho (Shanghai, 1940), pp. 85–87, 94; Yinhang zhoubao 13, no. 34 (Sept. 3, 1929), weekly commerce section, pp. 2–3, and 13, no. 37 (Sept. 24, 1929), weekly commerce section, p. 4; Gongshang banyuekan 2, no. 17 (Sept. 1, 1930), legislation section, pp. 4–6; and Shenbao , Jan. 19, 1937, sec. 4:14. For filature closings in Wuxi during the depression, see Gongshang banyuekan 2, no. 3 (Feb. 1, 1930), commercial news section, p. 16, and 4, no. 19 (Oct. 1, 1932), national economy section, pp. 1–2; He Bingxian, "Minguo ershiyinian Zhongguo gongshangye de huigu," Gongshang banyuekan 5, no. 1 (Jan. 1, 1933), articles section, p. 18; and Chushi Kensetsu Shiryo Seibi Jimusho, ed., Mushaku kogyo jijo (Shanghai, 1941), p. 40.

[30] This aspect of the modern silk industry in central China is often referred to in the literature as its speculative nature. See, for example, Wuxi Difangzhi Bianji Weiyuanhui, ed. Wuxi gushixuan , pp. 45–46; Chen Tingfang, "Juyou fengjian de maiban xingzhi de Zhongguo saosiye," in Chen Zhen, et al., eds., Zhongguo jindai gongyeshi ziliao (Beijing, 1959–61), 4:113; Zhuang Yaohe, interview with author, Wuxi, May 27, 1980; Chushi Kensetsu Shiryo Seibi Jimusho, ed., pp. 39–43; and SMR, Shanghai Office, Mushaku kogyo jittai chosa hokokusho , pp. 85–87.

Despite the riskiness of the endeavor, once Wuxi peasants plunged into sericulture, they persisted with great tenacity. Throughout the decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the proportion of land devoted to mulberries climbed steadily in Wuxi, to reach peaks of 20–30 percent in various locales by the early 1920s.^[31] And yet in many ways, such a decision on the part of Wuxi peasants remained something of an anomaly. Why did they continue to engage in sericulture, even after it became obvious that serious uncertainties existed both in weather and marketing conditions? Were the profits they reaped in good years enough to offset the possibility that, in bad years, they would lose their cocoon crop entirely? Or were there some other, even more compelling reasons for Wuxi peasants to persist in sericulture?

In the remainder of this chapter, I shall try to answer these questions using detailed survey materials on twentieth-century Wuxi agriculture. As I introduce the world of peasant-household decision making, I shall attempt to relate this discussion to the earlier trends I have described as evolving in Wuxi since the eighteenth century—a high level of commercialization, dense population, and the consequent need for peasants to develop strategies to supplement their income-earning potential through subsidiary household activity.

Land and Labor Allocation in three Wuxi Villages

Three villages in Wuxi were surveyed in 1940 by the Shanghai Office of the Japanese South Manchurian Railway Company (SMR), a research organization active in areas of China then occupied by the Japanese government.^[32] These villages lay within a one kilometer radius of the market town of Rongxiang zhen , approximately eight kilometers from the west gate of Wuxi City.^[33] This was a highly commercialized and densely populated area, yet the large majority of households still depended primarily upon rice/wheat agriculture and household-based subsidiary activities, with sericulture the

[31] Lu Guanying, "Jiangsu Wuxixian ershinianlai zhi siye guan," Nongshang gongbao 8, no. 1 (Aug. 15, 1921), articles and translations section, p. 45; Gongshang banyuekan 2, no. 15 (Aug. 1, 1930), investigation section, p. 3; and SMR, Shanghai Office, Kososho Mushakuken noson jittai chosa hokokusho (Shanghai, 1941), p. 11.

[32] SMR, Shanghai Office, Kososho Mushakuken . For a broader discussion of the research activities of the South Manchurian Railway Company in China, see Philip C. C. Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (Stanford, 1985).

[33] SMR, Shanghai Office, Kososho Mushakuken , pp. 14–15.

most important among these, for the bulk of their yearly incomes. Of the 80 households in these villages, 75 engaged in farming; they constituted the sample with which the Japanese researchers worked.^[34]

Although there is some cause for concern as to whether or not the conditions in these villages still reflected economic patterns as they had evolved before the effects of the depression and the Japanese occupation, the researchers themselves were highly sensitive to this issue. They explored available secondary sources on the percentage of land devoted to mulberries before the depression and found estimates ranging from one fifth to one third for various locales.^[35] In the survey villages in 1940, 22.5 percent of arable land was devoted to mulberries, a finding within the range of predepression figures.^[36] Even though mulberry acreage declined during the years when the depression affected silk prices most severely, that is, from 1930 to 1932, by 1940 peasants were restoring mulberry fields to their former position within the agrarian cropping regime.^[37] On the issue of prices for agricultural goods, the researchers reported not only 1939 data but also 1933 data collected in Wuxi by the Nationalist government in an effort to determine effects of inflationary trends caused by the Japanese occupation.^[38]

As elsewhere in Wuxi, most families in the Japanese-surveyed villages combined rice/wheat farming with mulberry cultivation and cocoon rearing. Rice was grown once yearly during the summer months. Then, after the fall harvest, peasants pumped their rice paddies dry and planted winter wheat on all or some of the land. Mulberries were planted in "field fashion" in Wuxi. Trees were not grown on embankments between rice fields, as in the older sericulture districts to the south of Wuxi, in Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Rather, a portion of arable land that could have been used for grain cultivation was used instead for mulberry trees. While the trees could be pruned and fertilized in off-peak periods of late fall, winter, and early spring, the first monthlong busy period for mulberries, during which the trees were stripped of their leaves for silkworm feeding, came from late April to late May, coinciding precisely with rice seedling preparation. In June, cocoons were marketed, wheat harvested, and rice seedlings transplanted, giving the peasants no time to recover from their extremely busy monthlong period of silkworm feeding and cocoon raising. Peasants raised a second cocoon crop in summer or, ideally, in early fall, when the mulberry regrowth was fuller. Fall crops

[34] Ibid., pp. 25–26.

[35] Ibid., p. 11.

[36] Ibid., table 1, following the text.

[37] Ibid., pp. 9–11, 18–19. Figures reported by the SMR research group indicate that about 378,000 mu were devoted to mulberry in 1927, 30 percent of all cultivated land in Wuxi. This figure fell steadily until 1932, when only 84,000 mu were cropped to mulberries. By the late 1930s, mulberry land was up again to 240,000 mu .

[38] Ibid., pp. 9–10. I shall also say more about the reconstruction of prices in note 43 below.

first became possible in Wuxi in the late 1910s, with the introduction of refrigeration and delayed incubation of silkworm eggs. The fall round of silkworm raising usually came in late August and ended in mid-September, long before the late October rice harvest. Since late summer/early fall was a less busy time for grain cultivation, this round of cocoon raising was not nearly as taxing for peasant families as in the spring.^[39]

To relate data from the Japanese survey to the previous discussion of peasant rationality, let me pose the question I am most interested in exploring: Precisely what did peasant families gain by engaging in this particular work regime? When considering this issue, I found it useful to construct Table 7.1, comparing income, production costs, and labor usage for rice/wheat farming and mulberry culivation combined with silkworm raising.^[40] The main point I wish to make with the comparison is that mulberry cultivation with silkworm raising brought slightly higher returns per mu than rice/wheat farming (9.25 yuan for rice/wheat versus 11.96 yuan for coccons) but fewer returns per labor day (0.27 yuan for rice/wheat versus 0.19 yuan for cocoons). Moreover, earnings from wage labor in agriculture were also higher, averaging 0.25 yuan per labor day.^[41] We see a situation, therefore, much like that observed by economists elsewhere—peasants who worked at certain tasks, in this case those of sericulture, for less than optimal returns to labor.^[42] Should we conclude from this finding that peasants were "irra-

[39] Ibid., pp. 55, 61, 69–70, 72, 74.

[40] Table 7.1 originally appeared in Bell, "Merchants, Peasants, and the State," p. 122; most of the data are derived from the SMR survey report. For a full accounting of all the calculations, see "Merchants, Peasants, and the State," pp. 122–24. Philip C. C. Huang (Peasant Family and Rural Development , p. 127) has argued that my original calculation for labor days spent in sericulture in this table was too low because I failed to take into account a sufficient number of days for pruning the trees and also the days in the growing cycle of silkworms when they rested. He then adds 28 days to my original estimate of 52 days to come up with a total of 80 days for mulberry cultivation and silkworm raising. I agree with Huang that the days silkworms rested (an additional 11 days for the spring and fall cycles combined) should be added to the total and I have done this in my calculations here. However, I am less sanguine about his decision to add an additional 17 days for pruning the trees. Villagers in neither survey discussed here (for more on the second survey, see the next section) said that they spent a total of 30 days yearly (Huang's estimate) working the mulberry fields; by contrast, they regularly gave a number in the range of five to thirteen days (see Table 7.1 and Table 7.5, labor for mulberry cultivation). What the villagers did say very often when questioned about their work in sericulture is that they spent 30 days in the spring season raising silkworms, an estimate which I interpret to have included all the work involved, including the stripping (or "pruning") of the trees to get leaves to feed to their silkworms. What seems to have happened in Huang's method of calculating, therefore, is that he counts the days during the silkworm raising cycles when leaves were stripped from the trees as labor days for both sericulture and work in the mulberry fields, to get a total of 80 days rather than my estimate of 63.

[41] The figure of 0.25 yuan for day labor in agriculture is the average found for central China's rice/wheat region by John Lossing Buck's 1929–33 survey of agricultural conditions throughout China. It is cited in SMR, Shanghai Office, Kososho Mushakuken , p. 93.

[42] Chayanov, Peasant Farm Organization .

tional"? I would argue that we should not, and at this point, take into careful account the problems of population density and scarcity of other options for earning cash income to understand why peasant families in Wuxi undertook sericulture.^[43]

[43] In order to dispel doubts that price figures in Table 7.1 may have been atypical and hence relevant only for the postdepression period in Wuxi, I have also computed price figures for a sample of 146 households in Wuxi in 1928 and 1929, selected from the Guoli Zhongyang Yangiuyuan survey. This second survey is explained more fully in the next section. Prices for rice, wheat, and cocoons were all slightly higher in 1928 and 1929 than in 1939, but the crucial comparison of earnings per labor day between rice/wheat farming and cocoon rearing remains valid. In fact, it tips even more dramatically in favor of rice/wheat farming producing higher returns to labor, with the average being 0.71 yuan as opposed to 0.28 yuan for cocoons. The even larger margin arises primarily because wheat prices were higher by about 55 percent in 1928–29 than in the postdepression period, while the prices for rice and cocoons were higher by only about 20 percent. Another point worth noting concerning calculations in Table 7.1 is that I have purposely excluded land price as a production cost, because price figures for rice/wheat land and mulberry land were nearly identical. I have confirmed this fact via an analysis of variance test on land prices from the Guoli Zhongyang Yanjiuyuan survey of 1929, which showed no significant difference between prices for the two types of land. Finally, interplanting mulberry with other crops, a strategy that might have lowered land costs for mulberry culture by raising total yield, was rare in Wuxi because local farmers planted their mulberry trees close together, leaving no room for other crops. This is substantiated by the Guoli Zhongyang Yanjiuyuan survey, which demonstrates that other crops such as peas, beans, and potatoes were not grown with mulberries, but rather were raised on small supplemental plots.

First of all, let us consider population issues and average size of farm holdings. Although gazetteer figures indicate that Wuxi lost as much as one half to two thirds of its population during the Taiping period, by the 1920s former levels of population density had been completely restored.^[44] The amount of available arable land per capita in Wuxi in 1929 stood at 1.3 mu , a figure identical to that reported for the late eighteenth century. This made Wuxi the second most densely populated county within Jiangsu Province.^[45] An important by-product of dense population was the small size of peasant farming units. In the SMR-surveyed villages, average farm size was 2.5 mu , approximately 0.2 hectare, or slightly more than one-third of an acre. Moreover, no single farm was larger than 7 mu , and 72 percent of the farming households owned 3 mu or less.^[46] Even by the standards of the Lower Yangzi region, where land was fertile and well irrigated and thus capable of supporting larger populations than in many other areas, these were very small farming units.^[47]

The small size of farms in Wuxi caused the Japanese researchers to consider carefully what other methods were used to augment family incomes. What they found was a fairly consistent pattern of subsidiary activities undertaken by village households. In terms of income-generating capacity, sericulture was most important, usually accounting for 50 percent or more of a family's cash earnings.^[48] There were other important trends under way as

[44] The estimate of population loss in Wuxi during the taiping period is calculated from cadastral figures found in Wuxi-Jinkui xianzhi 8:6–7. For a more precise accounting of the figures involved, see Bell, "Merchants, Peasants, and the State," p. 84.

[45] Chen Huayin, "Jiangsusheng renkou yu yiken tianmu zhi xilian," Tongji yuebao 1, no. 3 (May 1929):44–48.

[46] SMR, Shanghai Office, Kososho Mushakuken , pp. 23, 88.

[47] The SMR researchers had already surveyed villages in three other Jiangsu counties, where they found the average size of landholdings to be 6.4 mu (Jiading), 5.3 mu (Changshu), and 9.6 mu (Songjiang). They were quite surprised by the small size of farming units they observed in Wuxi. See SMR, Shanghai Office, Kososho Mushakuken , p. 23.

[48] SMR, Shanghai Office, Kososho Mushakuken , pp. 103–4.

well, with a high proportion of village men working away from home on a permanent basis, often as clerks or factory workers in Shanghai. But their yearly cash incomes were still lower on average than those generated through cocoon sales.^[49] Men could also remain in the villages to hire themselves out as agricultural wage labor, but because land was scarce, this was done only at peak seasons among village households as a means of satisfying temporary labor needs. The number of days men could work at such tasks was extremely limited and, in comparison to sericulture, provided only small amounts of supplementary cash income.^[50]

Given the constraints of peasant life in Wuxi, it thus appears that sericulture enabled peasants to better meet their subsistence requirements by increasing the total product of their family labor. First of all, sericulture employed women in an occupation that produced relatively higher cash earnings than cotton cloth production. When we compare the daily income from sericulture with that from cotton weaving, we see, on average, that women were able to earn only 0.02 yuan per day making cotton cloth versus 0.19 yuan from sericulture.^[51] In turn, peasants used most of their cash income from sericulture to purchase rice and other items necessary to satisfy immediate household consumption demands. Sixty percent of all cash income was spent on food, and most of the rest went to purchase clothing and other household goods. There is no evidence to suggest that these households had accumulated any substantial savings, and only 0.8 percent of cash income went to productive investments in agriculture.^[52] Rent obligations also figured into this picture for many families, putting a further strain on the capacity for self-sufficiency in grain production. Overall, about 25 percent of the land in these villages was rented, and 10 percent of the rice produced yearly went to rent payments.^[53]

The issue of what constitutes "survival capacity" for peasant households, or, put another way, their relative level of subsistence, is a highly volatile topic in the literature on peasant decision making. I cannot attempt to give the definitive answer to the question here. But to get at least some sense of the importance of sericulture in Wuxi in assuring what I would call "basic subsistence," I shall consider evidence concerning grain consumption both in China at large and in Wuxi in particular.

In the early 1930s, John Lossing Buck documented yearly adult grain consumption for China as a whole: it ranged from 390 to 952 jin . His figures

[49] Ibid., pp. 99–104.

[50] Ibid., pp. 88–95; tables 2 and 3, following the text.

[51] The figure for cotton weaving comes from Guoli Zhongyang Yanjiuyuan, selected questionnaires, table 11. The sericulture figure is found in Table 7.1 above.

[52] SMR, Shanghai Office, Kososho Mushakuken , pp. 122–24; table 15, part 2, following the text.

[53] Ibid., pp. 25, 144–47.

include not only the main cereal grains of rice, wheat, and millet but also potatoes, beans, and peas. In many areas of China, these latter three items often made up a large proportion of daily consumption for many peasant households. This could be because of the relative infertility of the land or because rent payments were usually demanded in the highest quality grain a given locale produced, leaving the poorest of local peasant families to consume coarser foodstuffs. Commenting on these figures and comparing them to provincial-level data for the 1950s, Dwight H. Perkins has concluded that about 400 jin of grain per adult per year is a fairly accurate estimate of China's "minimum subsistence" requirements.^[54]

In the SMR-surveyed villages in Wuxi, the preferred pattern of grain management and consumption for most households was to preserve as much of the rice they produced themselves as they could for their own use. As we have seen, rent obligations took about 10 percent of the rice produced, so that overall the village households had about 29,550 jin of their total production of 32,833 jin left for consumption purposes. They also purchased rice with cash income from sericulture, wheat sales, and other subsidiary employments, amounting to an additional 32,250 jin . When converted to the average amount of rice consumed yearly, this works out to approximately 824 jin of rice per household. Since the average household size was 4.1 members, this meant an average per capita rice consumption figure of only 201 jin . If we convert this to an adult equivalent for purposes of comparison with Buck's data (using Buck's estimate of 77 adult equivalents for a total population of 100), we arrive at a figure of 261 jin for the yearly rice consumption per adult villager. To come up to the minimum subsistence levels suggested by Perkins, Wuxi peasants supplemented their diets with broad beans and peas, which were both locally grown.^[55]

When viewed from this comparative perspective, we find that in terms of quantity of grain consumed, Wuxi villagers were quite near the lower end of the consumption range observed by Buck for China as a whole in the 1930s. Of course, their diet, which had a large proportion of white rice, was of quite high quality by Chinese standards. Relatively speaking, then, just how well off were these peasant households?

It seems fairly clear that as long as the market for Chinese raw silk was doing well, Wuxi peasants would rarely have faced hunger. Moreover, the

[54] This discussion of "minimum subsistence" is drawn from Perkins, Agricultural Development , pp. 14–15, 300–301. In the latter pages, Perkins cites Buck, Land Utilization in China: Statistical Volume (Nanking, 1937), at length.

[55] SMR, Shanghai Office, Kososho Mushakuken , pp. 144–49. The average size of a farming household is found in this same work, table 1 following the text. For Buck's "adult equivalent," see Perkins, Agricultural Development , p. 301. According to Guoli Zhongyang Yanjiuyuan, selected questionnaires, table 1, broad beans (candou ) and peas (wandou ) were both grown in Wuxi in 1929, broad beans being far more common.

grain they had available to them was of high quality, and they themselves must have felt quite satisfied that these sorts of options were available to them. However, when the market for raw silk was doing poorly, this rather fragile, near-subsistence-level system would have collapsed. To demonstrate this, we can consider what would have happened if all mulberry land within the SMR-surveyed villages had been converted back to rice/wheat farming, and sericulture abandoned. Many families in Wuxi took this option during the worst years of the depression. The additional rice that could have been produced on former mulberry land amounted to only 12,300 jin , a figure that falls far short of the 32,250 jin that villagers normally purchased.^[56] This means that if sericulture had been abandoned, peasant families would have had to find other ways to earn supplementary cash income to continue purchasing grain at their accustomed levels. Options that provided returns comparable to sericulture were not readily available within the village itself and, as we have seen, often meant out-migration for male members of individual farming families.^[57]

What I would argue on the basis of these considerations is that in Wuxi by the early twentieth century, sericulture had become a crucial link in a complex system that, in good years, provided moderate levels of subsistence for most farming families. Even though individual workers' earnings were below those to be had through rice/wheat farming, the total product of peasant family labor was raised via sericulture. Peasants tolerated this situation because under conditions of dense population and scarce land, finding ways to better employ peasant women had become essential. Since financial reserves were small or nonexistent and most cash income was spent on food and other basic living expenses, a sudden drop in income caused by falling silk prices would depress living standards for many peasant families in Wuxi and would push some households below basic subsistence requirements.^[58]

A Further Look at Wuxi Villages

To substantiate this picture of peasant family farming, some additional evidence can be garnered from a second rural survey in Wuxi. This second survey was carried out in the summer of 1929 by Chinese researchers of the Social Science Research Institute of the newly formed Academia Sinica. I

[56] I have made this calculation from figures on average rice output per mu and the number of mu currently cropped to mulberry. See "Merchants, Peasants, and the State," pp. 148–49.

[57] For a discussion of relative returns to various kinds of subsidiary occupations, see the next section of this paper.

[58] I have argued elsewhere that accounts of rural destitution during the 1930s in Wuxi reflect the impact of a collapsing world silk market on a regional economy that had become increasingly dependent on revenues from the production of cocoons and raw silk. See Bell, "Explaining China's Rural Crisis."

will present a more extensive analysis of these materials in a future book manuscript. Here I give only preliminary findings from a small sample of the total number of households surveyed. What is quite useful about these data is that they were collected before the depression, yet they reveal a nearly identical pattern of land and labor usage to that seen in the SMR survey.^[59]

When working with this second data set, my first concern has been to compare land and labor productivity in rice/wheat farming with mulberry cultivation and silkworm raising. If my original hypothesis is correct, then we would expect the results of Table 7.1 to be duplicated—namely, that overall cash earnings of the family might be raised via mulberry cultivation and silkworm raising but that labor productivity would be lower. We would also expect to see a preponderance of small peasant family farms operating on small plots, using primarily their own family labor for a combined effort in rice/wheat farming, silkworm raising, and other subsidiary occupations. In order to specify more precisely the significance of the size of farming units, I have also tried to introduce another comparative dimension into the data analysis, that is, between larger and smaller farming units, to see if there were any economies of scale at work and, if so, what size of farm produced the most efficient use of land and labor resources.

I have constructed a set of six tables from a 31-household sample selected from the three villages of Suxiang, Maocun, and Baishuidang.^[60] Table 7.2 presents the size distribution of farming units. Although these farms were slightly larger on average than those in the SMR survey, even the very largest farms worked only between 20 and 38.5 mu . In fact, in the entire sample of 800 households, only 25 households worked 20 mu or more. Where size did seem to make some difference was in the decision of what proportion of farmland would be planted in mulberry. Very small farms sometimes planted all of their land in mulberry, an indication that they may have hoped that a more intensive effort in sericulture would increase their overall earning

[59] Guoli Zhongyang Yanjiuyuan, selected questionnaires from Suxiang (Beiyanxia Township), Maocun (Kaiyuan Township), and Baishuidang (Yangming Township). In the 1950s and 1960s, the Chinese scholar Zhang Zhiyi was working through these materials; however, during the Cultural Revolution his manuscript was lost. Since that time, the materials have been housed at the Institute of Economics in Beijing. I am grateful to Professor Chen Hansheng, who led the original survey, for telling me that the materials were still at the Institute, and to Professors Dong Fureng and Peng Zeyi for arranging access to them. Shang Lie of the Modern History Section of the Institute also has helped to sort the materials, and Professor Liu Kexiang has helped familiarize me with much of the special terminology used, especially in matters of landholding.

[60] I have chosen the 31–household sample using three criteria. First, I have aimed for roughly the same proportions of large, medium, and small farms found in the entire group of 800 survey questionnaires. Secondly, these 31 households came from three ecologically different villages. And finally, these households had no missing data in the categories relevant to the argument I present below.

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potential despite the riskiness of such a venture. This never happened among medium-size or larger farms.

Table 7.3 looks at yields per mu of different types of farmland—a rough measure of land productivity. The results among different-size farms are ambiguous, indicating that economies of scale probably did not apply in this system. Larger farms did not get consistently higher yields per mu than small farms in any crop. But what does seem of importance in this table is a higher degree of variance in both physical yields and monetary returns for mulberry cultivation as opposed to rice/wheat farming. Physical returns for Rice 1 for Maocun, for example, varied by roughly a 2 to 1 ratio, whereas physical returns for mulberry varied by 5 to 1. Likewise, financial returns varied by less than 3 to 1 for Rice 1 but varied from -4.00 yuan to 22.00 yuan for mulberry, a range that included the possibility of negative returns for some households. The reason for the greater variance in financial returns to mulberry can be attributed to at least two factors: the difficult climatic conditions for silkworm raising that prevailed in Wuxi and the vagaries of daily market prices for both cocoons and mulberries. We have seen that Wuxi's springs were cold and damp, often leading to bacterial infection among silkworms and the total destruction of some households' yearly crops. In addition, prices for cocoons and mulberry leaves varied widely from one day to another and also among marketing locations. Both these factors meant that some families spent more fertilizing their mulberry fields and buying silkworm eggs than they were able to earn by selling their cocoon crop.^[61] The result was that mulberry cultivation, with its widely varying financial returns, was much riskier than devoting land to a combination of rice and wheat farming.

Tables 7.4, 7.5, 7.6, and 7.7 explore questions of labor usage and labor productivity. Tables 7.4 and 7.5 summarize labor usage. In Table 7.5 we see that the majority of labor days in silkworm raising were performed by household labor, especially that of women.^[62] Comparisons among villages are also important. We see in Baishuidang, for example, that all households put more total labor days into mulberry cultivation and cocoon rearing than into rice/

[61] On daily and hourly fluctuations in cocoon prices see "Jianshi zaxun" [Miscellaneous reports on cocoon markets], Minguo ribao , June 4, 1917, sec. 2:7; "Wuxi—shiju bujing zhi shangshi" [Wuxi—markets in chaos], Minguo ribao , June 4, 1917, sec. 2:7; and "Zhijie shouhai zhi shangkuang" [Trade experiences immediate adverse effects], Minguo ribao , June 5, 1917, sec. 3: 10; on problems in the erratic pricing of mulberry leaves according to widely fluctuating demand, see Wang Xuexiang, "Gaishan sangye maimai jigou zhi guanjian" [My opinions on reforming marketing mechanisms for mulberry leaves], Zhongguo canci 2, no. 7 (Jan. 1937): 92–93.

[62] In the Suxiang households, there are slightly more labor days in silkworm raising performed by men. This is an unusual aspect of the labor distribution among the ten households sampled here. Calculations for a larger sample of 141 households across 13 villages show that 69 percent of silkworm raising days were performed by household women. See Lynda S. Bell, "Chinese Women and the Value of 'Surplus Labor,'" (Los Angeles, 1990) pp. 12–13.

wheat farming. This suggests that in future work with these data, it will be worth testing intensity of labor effort in sericulture against size of landholdings as well as the availability of other kinds of subsidiary employment in various villages. Each of these factors probably influenced a peasant family's decision to work more intensively at sericulture. If there was to too little land or too few opportunities for other outside employment, a family would have no choice but to work more intensively at their sericulture effort.

Table 7.6 examines the composition of family labor units. Three things are striking about this table. First is the number of adult males by size of farm. Small farms almost always had only one adult male, suggesting that division of household property in each generation (fenjia ) was an important downward leveling force. Second, only the largest farms hired laborers by the year. Since large farms were very rare in Wuxi, this is an indication that the demand for full-time agricultural laborers was quite small. Finally, most farms, regardless of size, hired some day labor. However, as in the villages of the SMR survey, this method was used only to fill temporary labor needs, usually at peak periods of planting and harvesting. The most intensive period came in May and early June, when peasants were tending to delicate rice seedlings, raising silkworms, marketing cocoons, and harvesting winter wheat. Overall, this table shows that with the conjugal family as the principal unit of production, most farms remained quite small and hired additional labor only as short-term labor needs dictated.

Finally, Table 7.7 looks at the important issue of labor productivity. The most conclusive data of the analysis thus far are found in the final column of this table: returns per unit of labor were, as anticipated, almost always lower for mulberry cultivation and silkworm raising than for rice/wheat farming. This duplicates in more precise terms my former analysis of the SMR data, confirming that participation in sericulture raised family income overall even as it lowered labor productivity in terms of net income per labor day for the household as a whole. Thus, as before, I would argue that sericulture was a form of labor intensification in which peasant families engaged to allow their continued survival under conditions of high population density and a relatively low land-labor ratio.

What this analysis has not yet provided is an answer to why sericulture was chosen over other forms of subsidiary work, including factory employment and other handicraft options. It is true, for example, that factory work brought relatively high cash returns. Data from the 1929 survey on factory wages indicate that child female factory workers could earn about 0.10 yuan per day while women made 0.40 to 0.50 yuan per day. Comparing these sums to those observed for returns to sericulture in the final column of Table 7.7 shows that earnings per day for work in sericulture were often roughly comparable to factory wages but not as reliable, with a great deal of variation possible. Despite the better wage-earning conditions, the survey also indicates

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that relatively few females were employed in factories in Wuxi in 1929, a situation that may be explained by factors other than cash-earning considerations. When peasant girls and women were sent to factories, their prolonged absence meant that families were deprived of their work in domestic services such as cooking, child-care, and animal tending. For many peasant households, therefore, the loss in female services offset the benefits of a reliable cash wage from factory work. As for the possibility of substituting other cash-earning options within the household setting, compared to sericulture they all brought far fewer returns to labor: only 0.03 yuan per day for making hemp rope, 0.02 yuan per day for weaving cotton, and 0.03 yuan per day for making lace. These meager amounts made such options far less attractive than sericulture as cash-earning alternatives within the household setting.^[63]

Peasant Farming and Problems of Silk Industry Growth

Given the constraints of environment, demography, and available options for earning cash income, the Wuxi peasant decision for sericulture was entirely rational. At the same time, however, Wuxi peasants did not earn exceptionally high incomes through this route. As they intensified their labor effort in sericulture, they remained fairly close to subsistence-level living conditions, spending most of their cash income to satisfy yearly consumption demands. These facts allow me to comment briefly on the pitfalls of assuming any close relationship between peasant rationality and the potential for new forms of economic growth.

Because sericulture was primarily a method used to augment family income to satisfy immediate consumption demands, little surplus income was available for technical improvements. Although the most modern methods of silkworm breeding were known in Wuxi, the majority of small peasant family farms were not able to introduce them. These techniques included crossbreeding of silkworm egg varieties to strengthen disease resistance; refrigeration of silkworm eggs to allow for more efficient timing of summer and fall cocoon raising; close regulation of temperature during the silkworm-raising process; and use of bacterial disinfectants to protect delicate silkworms in their early stages of growth.^[64] Some households had access to improved egg cards via state-supported and privately run egg breederies, but these improved cards had to be purchased by the peasant households. They were rarely given free of charge even on an experimental basis and thus required

[63] Guoli Zhongyang Yanjiuyuan, selected questionnaires, table 11.

[64] For further discussion of problems of silkworm raising and methods of sericulture improvement, see Bell, "Merchants, Peasants, and the State," pp. 49–50, and chap. 4; and Dierlishi Dang'anguan, file no. 3504, "Jiang-Zhe-Wan-Hu qudi canzhong qingxing."

yearly cash outlays that peasant households often did not or could not make.^[65] Methods of temperature control and disinfectant use were even more difficult to implement because silkworms were reared within peasant family living quarters. The most efficient way to implement these improved methods would have been to build separate facilities designed especially for silkworm rearing.^[66] This option was simply not within the means of most Wuxi peasant households. The results were clear enough: the 1929 survey data from Wuxi show a high rate of yearly cocoon crop failure, with many households routinely losing an entire season's efforts. Moreover, the quality of cocoons remained low compared to rapidly improving Japanese varieties, and the quantity of cocoons needed to make equivalent amounts of raw silk remained high.^[67]

Poor raw material supply does not tell the whole story of the problems encountered by China's silk industry. I raise this issue here only to suggest that the purist approach to peasant rationality does not do much to explain the larger developmental issues at stake. Ultimately, a fuller analysis of silk industry growth should also include discussion of capital markets, the behavior of new bourgeois investors, political institutions, and the interrelationships of all such factors to the rural base.^[68] To begin such an analysis, a modified understanding of peasant rationality is useful as a first step. We should realize that small peasant family farming in Wuxi, a perfectly rational system of peasant behavior, may have been more of a hindrance than a help to silk industry growth.

[65] Guoli Zhongyang Yanjiuyuan, selected questionnaires, table 8, shows only a moderate rate of improved silkworm egg usage in Wuxi in 1929, far less than I believed previously on the basis of information available for the mid-1930s. See Bell, "Merchants, Peasants, and the State," p. 234.

[66] When I visited sites of silkworm raising in Wuxi in 1980, I observed that temporary thatched, windowless structures put up within mulberry fields and collectively managed by groups of peasant women were quite efficient for maintaining temperature and draft control. Coal stoves were kept burning inside constantly, and the temperature was carefully monitored. See also Dierlishi Dang'anguan, file no. 3504, "Liangnianlai," p. 4, for a discussion of the construction of silkworm rearing facilities within sericulture experimental stations designed to control drafts and temperature change. A report on a trip by a U.N.-sponsored group to sericulture areas in central China in 1979 also discussed the relative success of collective silkworm-rearing enterprises in maintaining conditions of constant temperature and humidity. See Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, China: Sericulture. Report on a FAO/UNDP Study Tour to the People's Republic of China, 6 May to 4 June 1979 (Rome, 1980), pp. 38–42.

[67] According to personal accounts of former sericulture improvement specialists, it took 6 dan of dried cocoons to make 1 dan of Chinese raw silk. In Japan, because improved silkworms produced cocoons with fibers of increased length and strength, only 3.5–4 dan of dried cocoons were needed during the 1920s to produce 1 dan of raw silk. See Bell, "Merchants, Peasants, and the State," p. 217.

[68] This fuller analysis will appear in a book now in preparation.

In this chapter, I have provided a long-term view of peasant decision making in Wuxi. By looking at trends in rural development over three centuries, the switch to sericulture in Wuxi can be seen as a product not only of new opportunities brought about through world market integration but also of long-term demographic trends and the development of subsidiary activities to increase the income-earning potential of individual peasant families. Another focus here has been on the internal workings of farm households to understand more precisely what motivates their actions. I have shown that under conditions of a low land-labor ratio and few options for nonfarm employment, peasants were willing to work at sericulture despite the low and unreliable income that it provided. What they gained was a chance to better employ peasant women and increase the income-earning potential of the family as a whole. Although these actions were entirely rational, peasant families in Wuxi worked close to subsistence levels so that surplus earnings for investment were slim. These findings suggest that future studies of Chinese development should take into careful account the evolution of peasant family farming systems in various regions and the nature of their impact on long-term patterns of economic growth.

Eight
Women's Work in the Ningbo Area, 1900–1936

Susan Mann

The economy of nineteenth-century Chinese farm households depended on the combined labor of men and women. How did the growth of foreign trade and the rise of industrialization affect women's work? This chapter argues that, in one coastal area, foreign trade and early industrialization increased the importance of women's work in the household economy. However, each woman's access to new sources of income was constrained by class, by locality, by household composition, and by her point in the life cycle.^[1]

In the late empire, agricultural treatises and local custom attest to a clear gender division of labor in Chinese peasant households: "men plow, women weave" (nan geng nü zhi ). This gender division of labor reflected beliefs about women's work that were widely shared in late imperial society. First, Chinese women were supposed to work inside the home; on the eve of industrialization, the bulk of farm labor in China was performed by men.^[2] Second,

[1] The author acknowledges with thanks critical comments from Jon Cohen, Emily Honig, Lillian M. Li, Thomas G. Rawski, G. William Skinner, Richard Sutch, and the anonymous readers. The original research for this chapter was supported by a faculty research grant from the Academic Senate, University of California, Santa Cruz. For invaluable new data collected during a research trip to China in 1988, I am grateful to the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China, which sponsored the research, and to members of my host institution, the Economics Institute of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, especially Yao Xinrong.

[2] Strong taboos on women's going "outside" implied that those who could be seen on the streets or in the fields—working or not—were of questionable reputation or at least of lower-class background. In most parts of China, public opinion held that except at the peak of the harvest season, it was proper for women to stay out of the fields. Extensive evidence is presented in John Lossing Buck, Land Utilization in China (Nanking, 1937; repr. New York, 1956), 1:240, 290–92, 307. In an article published in 1935, Luo Qiong quotes a couplet recited in double-crop rice areas: "Men look forward to gathering the grain; women look forward to transplanting the seedlings." She observes that for women in these areas, transplanting rice presented one of very few opportunities to venture outside the home. See Luo Qiong, "Zhongguo nongcunzhong de laodong funü," Funü shenghuo 1, no. 4 (October 1935): 21.

women's work "inside" and men's work "outside" were seen as complementary and mutually supportive, essential not only to the welfare of the household itself but to the economic health of the entire society as well.^[3]

Increased exposure to foreign markets and the advent of industrialization profoundly affected the normative division of labor in the Chinese peasant household, but did not diminish the household's dependence on the combined labor of women and men.^[4] In fact, the importance of women's work increased. New markets drew the products of some domestic cottage industry into foreign trade, raising the income women could expect to earn from, say, mat weaving or embroidery. Some women's handicraft industries (notably cotton spinning) did collapse, in some areas, in the face of competition with cheaper manufactured goods. But textile factories and other light industries also offered a new generation of women jobs outside the home.^[5]

Studies of early industrialization have drawn conflicting conclusions about its effects on women and their work. On the negative side, for instance, cottage industry may suffer when competing factories produce better quality goods at lower prices.^[6] The decline of protoindustry may also be harder on women than on men, because factory competition is keenest in light industries—spinning and weaving—where women make most of their in-

[3] See, for example, Yin Huiyi, "Jing chen nongsang siwu shu," in Wei Yuan, comp., Huangchao jingshi wenbian (Preface dated 1826/27, repr. Taibei, 1963), 36:15b.

[4] See Gary S. Becker, "A Theory of Marriage," Journal of Political Economy 81 (1973): 813–46; 82 (1974): 911–16; and Fredericka Pickford Santos, "The Economics of Marital Status," in Cynthia B. Lloyd, ed., Sex, Discrimination, and the Division of Labor (New York, 1975), pp. 244–68. Both stress the impact of changing work opportunities on the gender division of labor within the household.

[5] Albert Feuerwerker, "Economic Trends in the Late Ch'ing Empire, 1870–1911," in John K. Fairbank and Kwang-ching Liu, eds., The Cambridge History of China , vol. 11, pt 2 (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 15–28. In this respect, China's economic development resembles patterns found in Europe on the eve of industrialization. However, the Chinese case examined here differs from the European case in two important respects: there was no pastoral economy along China's coast, and nuptiality was early and nearly universal for women. In China, as in Europe, access to new markets and the rising importance of putting-out systems played an important role in shifting patterns of women's work. See, e.g., Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work, and Family (New York, 1978), and Lindsey Charles and Lorna Duffin, eds., Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England (London, 1985). Early industrialization in the Ningbo area is discussed in Yoshinobu Shiba, "Ningbo and Its Hinterland," in G. William Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 1977), pp. 411–13; and Nyok-Ching Tsur, "Forms of Business in the City of Ningpo in China," trans. Peter Schran, Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 15, no. 4 (1983).

[6] See Hans Medick, "The Proto-Industrial Family Economy," in Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick, and Jurgen Schlumbohn, Industrialization before Industrialization , trans. Beate Schempp (London, 1981).

come. New factories may have other negative consequences for peasant women, as their menfolk depart for urban factory jobs, leaving women to assume the full burden of agricultural labor.^[7] Finally, even where women enter factories alongside men, they are still likely to be shunted into the lowest-paying, least-skilled jobs, cut off from avenues to upward mobility that new industry provides for men.^[8]

But there are ways in which women may benefit from early industrialization. Some studies show that new job opportunities outside the home enable young women to earn money that may contribute toward their dowries, enhance their economic value in the household, or even permit some independence from family authority.^[9] A recent analysis has argued, in this vein, that the growth of foreign trade associated with China's early industrialization benefited women by increasing their earning power and their economic value, leading to a rise in the bride-price families were willing to pay.^[10] Finally, there is evidence that even the lowest-paying, most arduous factory jobs were more appealing to many young women than the tedium and drudgery of farm work. Combined with the lure of "city lights," so this argument goes, a factory job that offered three meals a day, a bed of one's own, and freedom from parental supervision was better than anything down on the farm.^[11]

Clearly, there is no simple or single answer to questions about the impact of industrialization on women's work in the household economy. Nonetheless, this chapter draws some conclusions from data on Chinese women's work in one particular region, the Ningbo area of northeastern Zhejiang

[7] See Ester Boserup, Woman's Role in Economic Development (New York, 1970).

[8] For a critical discussion of these issues, see Nancy Folbre, "Cleaning House: New Perspectives on Households and Economic Development," Journal of Development Economics 22, no. 1 (1986): 5–40; Laurel Bossen, "Women in Modernizing Societies," American Ethnologist 2, no. 4 (1975): 587–601.

[9] See, e.g., Tilly and Scott, Women, Work, and Family , pp. 94–95; Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York, 1979). Dublin argues that in Lowell, women workers enjoyed more autonomy from family authority than found in Europe by Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott. In Lowell, he suggests, women workers did not have to send their money home, and mill work was not "simply an extension of the traditional family economy as work for women moved outside the home" (p. 40). The jury on this issue is still out. For a summary of the issues in debate, see Dublin, Women at Work , pp. 36–42.

[10] Marshall Johnson, William L. Parish, and Elizabeth Lin, "Chinese Women, Rural Society, and External Markets," Economic Development and Cultural Change 35, no. 2 (1987): 257–77.

[11] City lights and youthful autonomy are a powerful theme in many studies of early industrialization, including Alice Clark's work on England. See Alice Clark, The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1919). Even without city lights, factory dormitories offered better accommodations for many young women than their own families could or would provide. See Mikiso Hane, Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan (New York, 1982), pp. 180–81. Emily Honig, Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919–1949 (Stanford, 1986), pp. 168–71, comments briefly on all these issues. See also Elisabeth Croll, Feminism and Socialism in China (New York, 1980), pp. 174–75.

Province. The Ningbo data show how Chinese households responded to changes introduced by foreign market exposure and industrialization and how these changes affected women's place in the household economy.

In Ningbo, with its long history of commercialization, the gender division of labor in the household was well developed around women's handicraft or domestic work long before industrialization. Moreover, the importance of women's work in Ningbo household economies increased during the early stages of industrialization. We see this not only in expanding overseas markets for traditional crafts but also in new factory jobs for women, and even in wages paid to women farm workers. In other words, it is certain that the earning power of many Ningbo women did improve as a direct or indirect result of commercialization and industrialization. At the same time, the Ningbo data underscore the importance of local custom in shaping women's work experience. For instance, Ningbo women claimed a reputation for fine domestic service and fine handwork that privileged them (by comparison with women from other localities) as they entered new job markets, particularly in Shanghai. Their entry into new job markets was eased by kin and native-place ties that created networks to help migrating workers. But the significance of reputation and networks varied by region and by class within the Ningbo area.

My analysis asks two intersecting questions to address these issues. First, how did community norms and local custom affect household responses to new female labor markets? Second, how were women of different classes affected by new economic opportunities? Answers to these questions shed light on other aspects of early industrialization and its effects on women. For example, how did female labor markets and household responses vary across regional space? How effectively did factory jobs compete with cottage industries for women's labor? Did new economic opportunities have an impact on women's status inside or outside the home?

In many ways, as we shall see, local custom lay at the heart of all of these problems in the Ningbo area. Women's work outside the home was considered a mark of low status by Ningbo people, and respectable families went to great lengths to sequester their women. As a result, few of the economic changes associated with industrialization in Ningbo improved the status of women relative to men. Upper-class families hired maids to give their womenfolk more leisure. Middle-class households reorganized to make money from home embroidery arts. Poor families relied increasingly on income from female labor to tide them over crises or to supplement the meager earnings of male workers. Only as a last resort did families send a mother or a daughter or a daughter-in-law out to work in a factory. The result was that whereas access to jobs, education, and training outside the home—in factories, banks, shops, on the docks—expanded continuously for Ningbo men during the period of this study, relatively few Ningbo women were able, or

willing, to move beyond the household. Instead, the preferred pattern among Ningbo families was for women to maintain the Ningbo home for sojourning male kinfolk.

Women from well-off households in Ningbo, especially those households at the peak of the domestic cycle with many adult women, managed to comply with local custom while earning income at home. They even had an advantage in the home handicraft market, because of economies of scale associated with housework and child care in the home.^[12] Within large joint families, young unmarried women and able-bodied widows also had special advantages: they could expect to earn more from handicrafts than new mothers and mid-life housewives, because their energies were not divided by the demands of in-laws, spouse, and children. And all women in upper-class and middle-class households had servants. Women in well-off families, in other words, could make choices about work, which set them apart from the women who went out as servants or as factory workers, taking on a double burden.

Class differences in women's work showed up in regional space as well. Families in the affluent suburbs of Ningbo cultivated the gentle art of embroidery; women in remote villages wove hats from razor-sharp grasses that lacerated fingers. Whatever their class and wherever they lived, however, Ningbo women experienced dramatic changes in the uses of female labor during the first decades of the early twentieth century.

The Ningbo Area, Northeastern Zhejiang

The city of Ningbo lies south of Shanghai and Hangzhou, near the coast, in the northeast corner of Zhejiang Province (see Map 8.1). It is part of the Lower Yangzi macroregion, the most highly urbanized and affluent section of the country on the eve of the twentieth century.^[13]

Ningbo was a historic seaport. A leading center of foreign and coastal

[12] The term "domestic cycle" refers to the expansion and contraction of the household unit resulting from births, adoptions, marriages, and deaths. Thus in a joint family system, the nadir of the domestic cycle may find a household reduced to a single married couple and their very young offspring. By contrast, at the peak of the domestic cycle this same household may expand to encompass three or more generations, including a senior married couple, several married sons and their wives, and the offspring of those marriages. Although most Chinese families aspired to the Confucian ideal of a joint family, in which parents shared a household with married sons and their offspring, in reality, both class and the domestic cycle modified household composition. For the classic discussion of the domestic cycle, see Maurice Freedman, "The Chinese Domestic Family: Models," in The Study of Chinese Society: Essays by Maurice Freedman (Stanford, 1979), pp. 235–39. Susan Greenhalgh develops an empirically based model of the economic advantages accruing to large households in her article "Is Inequality Demographically Induced? The Family Cycle and the Distribution of Income in Taiwan," American Anthropologist 87, no. 3 (1985).

[13] See G. William Skinner, "Regional Urbanization in Nineteenth-Century China," in G. William Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 1977), pp. 211–49, esp. 236–43.

Map 8.1.
Ningbo and Its Hinterland, ca. 1930.

trade as early as the Tang dynasty (618–906), it prospered in the late eighteenth century as a port for the coastal trade in local fish, salt, and rice. A history of Yin County, of which Ningbo was the seat, says that Ningbo trade began a new phase of growth early in the nineteenth century, as merchants from Fujian, Guangdong, and the Lower Yangzi Delta "gathered there like the clouds," while Ningbo traders left home for Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Suzhou, Shanghai, Hankou, Niuzhuang, and cities along the southeast coast, sometimes sojourning for years at a time. They also took up residence in Japan, Luzon, Singapore, Sumatra, and what is now Sri Lanka, opening shops and intermarrying with local women.^[14] The Ningbo diaspora coincided with the growth of foreign trade along the China coast.^[15] By 1800, Ningbo traders had established a foothold in Shanghai, founding a well-endowed native-place association to look after the needs and interests of its sojourning population there.

During the late imperial period, the Ningbo region (including the counties of Fenghua and Yuyao) was the home of manufactured goods sold all over China, as well as in Southeast Asia. Ningbo furniture, Fenghua woodcarvings, and Yuyao iron pans took their place beside Hangzhou scissors and Shaoxing wine as the best of their kind in the interregional domestic market. These were artisanal crafts, produced by masters and their apprentices in homes and small shops. Some traced their origins to a famous founder (Yu Xiaoxia, the late Qing bamboo carver of Fenghua, for instance) or shop (the Renhe iron pan forgery in Yuyao, founded in 1662).^[16]

In late Qing times, Ningbo women's handwork was also famous throughout the country and in Southeast Asia. Ningbo women produced handwoven cloth, rush mats and matting, hats made of straw or bamboo splints, and the canopies of oiled-paper umbrellas. All were counted among the local specialities that made Ningbo famous. Women also staffed the elegant mansions of the famous Ningbo elite: the bankers, financiers, and shipping magnates whose life-style matched their money: "there were more maids in the homes of wealthy Ningbo families than anywhere else in the empire."^[17] In sum, a complex division of labor, balancing agriculture, industry, and service and

[14] See Xinxiu Yin xianzhi (1877), 2:5b–6b. On the history of the port of Ningbo, see Shiba, "Ningbo and Its Hinterland," pp. 391–439. On Ningbo's development since the mid-eighteenth century, see Susan Mann Jones, "Finance in Ningpo: The ch'ien-chuang , 1750–1880," in William E. Willmott, ed., Economic Organization in Chinese Society (Stanford, 1972), pp. 52–55, and literature cited therein.

[15] On the history of European trade at Ningbo before the nineteenth century, see H. B. Morse, The Trade and Administration of China (London, 1921), pp. 226, 271–72.

[16] See China Industrial Handbooks: Chekiang (hereafter CIH:C; Shanghai 1935, repr. Taibei, 1973), pp. 739, 680. A detailed account of local protoindustrial specialties appears in Shiba, "Ningbo and Its Hinterland," pp. 424–27.

[17] See Tang Kangxiong, "Ningbo de niumu," in Zhang Xingzhou, comp., Ningbo xisu congtan (Taibei, 1973), p. 255.

based on the complementary spheres of male and female production, supported a flourishing local economy in Ningbo and its hinterland.

After the treaty of 1842 that opened Chinese ports to European trade, Shanghai became the central port of foreign trade for the Lower Yangzi region. Ningbo lost its preeminence as a port of foreign trade and became part of Shanghai's greater metropolitan trading system. But by then the city already had a well-honed financial connection to Shanghai. Ningbo bankers and financiers in Shanghai helped their home region ride the coattails of Shanghai's success. In 1877 the same currency exchange rates linked the economies of the Lower Yangzi cities of Suzhou, Hangzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai.^[18] Until the end of the period of this study, Ningbo's economic fortunes rose and fell with Shanghai's.^[19]

Meanwhile, the local economy of the Ningbo region was also changing. By the early twentieth century, the region had become part of a commercial cotton belt stretching along the coastal edge of the province. Ningbo City, located at the mouth of the Yong River and (after 1914) at the terminus of the Shanghai-Hangzhou-Ningbo railway, grew into an important cotton center.^[20] Widespread conversion of paddy land to cotton cultivation turned six of Ningbo Prefecture's seven counties into net rice importers. Market dependency throughout the area increased because of specialization in commercial cotton growing.^[21] Additional commercial crops produced in the area included medicinal herbs, peaches and plums, salt (manufactured under government control), tong oil, silk, and tea, while fishing remained the mainstay of the southeastern portion of Yin County and coastal Zhenhai and Dinghai counties.^[22] Traditional crafts—metal and leather work, shipbuilding, woodcarving, furniture making, and mat and hat weaving in the city and its hinterland—also continued to draw members of peasant households into the commercial economy, either as male apprentices in artisans' shops or as home handicraft workers.

French, English, and American missionaries arrived, accompanied by merchant compatriots eager to export local crafts. Exposure to new international markets varied within the Ningbo region, depending upon local trans-

[18] Xinxiu Yin xianzhi (1877), 2:5b–6b.

[19] Yin xian tongzhi (1936), "Shihuo zhi," p. 277.

[20] The railroad, begun in 1909, was partially completed in 1914, except for a critical bridge link over the Cao'e River, which was not in place until after 1933. The city of Ningbo in 1933 was home to 20 cotton firms, each handling between $0.5 million and $1.5 million worth of cotton fiber yearly. See CIH:C , p. 218.

[21] CIH:C , p. 1943.

[22] See Himeda Mitsuyoshi, "Chugoku kindai gyogyoshi no hito koma—Kanpo hachi nen Kin ken no gyomin toso o megutte," in Toyo 8 (Tokyo, 1967): 66–67; on the commercial economy of Zhenhai, see Zhenhai xianzhi , suppl. Xinzhi beigao (Preface dated 1924, published 1931), 42:30a, 55–57; on Dinghai County, see Dinghai xianzhi , "Yuyan zhi" (Preface dated 1923, repr. Keelung, 1963).

port and location. For example, by the turn of the century the counties along the steamer route connecting Ningbo to Shanghai—Zhenhai and Dinghai—were drawn into migration and occupational networks flowing to Shanghai. Ningbo's inexpensive coastal access to Shanghai meant that local people of all classes could travel regularly to the economic center of the realm.^[23]

In Ningbo's interior, the impact of foreign trade spread more slowly, first into Yuyao County, to the west of Ningbo City, with the partial completion of a rail line through the county that linked Hangzhou to Ningbo City. By the 1920s Yuyao had become the central producer of cotton for new local industry. Fenghua County, by contrast, remained a relative backwater. Situated off to the southwest, at the head of a shallow network of waterways that drained into the Yong River Basin, the county drew scornful comments from visiting foreigners in 1918. They complained about its cobblestoned streets (hard even to walk on), its shallow waterways, and the high cost of overland transport (a macadam road linking Fenghua to Ningbo was completed only in 1929).^[24]

These differences in regional economic change show up sharply in survey data from the early 1930s. Consider, for instance, three of the counties just mentioned and compare the mix of agriculture and industry in each. In 1933 the county of Yin, where Ningbo was the county seat, ranked third in industrial development among administrative units in Zhejiang Province (after Hangzhou, the provincial capital, and the coastal county of Wenzhou to the south). Yin County was home to more than 20 kinds of local industry: cotton weaving (including towels), knitting, oil pressing, brewing (soy sauce and wine), cotton spinning, rice husking, tea firing, flour milling, food canning, printing, ice making, ironmongery and related industries, glass, soap, lacquer, matches, brass and tin wares, straw matting and hats, rattan and bamboo wares, wooden furniture and implements, umbrellas, electricity, dry-cell batteries, and tinfoil (used mostly for making what foreigners called joss paper to be burned in sacrifices and at funerals). Yuyao County, by contrast, listed only 12 specialties; and Fenghua, six.^[25] Three of Fenghua's six local

[23] On the efficient steamer launches connecting Yuyao, Ningbo, and Zhenhai with the Chusan Islands (Dinghai County) as early as 1904, see the North-China Herald , May 27, 1904: 1097. Steamer traffic between Shanghai and Ningbo was carried by a French line catering to "middle and upper class" Chinese travelers, causing the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company to upgrade its own facilities for Chinese travelers in order to compete (North-China Herald , March 15, 1907: 548–49). The triumphal entry of the first Ningbo-owned and Ningbo-operated steamer into Shanghai in 1909 is described in the North-China Herald , July 10, 1909: 123–24. The Ning-Shao Steamship Company's Shanghai-Ningbo route carried up to 3,000 passengers in steerage (North-China Herald , June 12, 1909: 609).

[24] On the road, see Yin xian tongzhi , "Yudi zhi," p. 719; on earlier conditions, see Shina shobetsu zenshi (hereafter SSZ ), vol. 13, Zhejiang Province (Tokyo, 1919), pp. 100–101.

[25] See Zhongguo Shiyebu, Guoji Maoyiju, Zhongguo shiye zhi: Zhejiang sheng (hereafter ZSZZ ; Chinese industrial handbook: Zhejiang province; Shanghai, 1933), section geng : 6–10; CIH:C , p. 477.

industries—tea firing, handmade paper making, and bamboo and stone carving—were cottage industries catering to a domestic market. A small power plant and a factory for canning bamboo shoots (opened after 1920 and closed in 1931, in a pattern characteristic of the early local industries during this period) were the lone outposts of industrialization in Fenghua. In 1933 Fenghua was still exporting 65 percent of its rice to other areas, while Yuyao, the most important cotton-producing county in the region, imported 95 percent of its rice in the same year.^[26]

In this commercialized part of Zhejiang Province, then, after the impact of foreign trade and early industrialization, three types of local economy coexisted, dominated respectively by an urban industrial and commercial labor market (Yin), a mixed economy of commercial agriculture and cottage industry (Yuyao), and a preindustrial economy based on rice agriculture and traditional crafts (Fenghua).

Female Farm Labor

Opportunities for women's work were affected by the same patterns of local variation. Take farm labor as an example. The Chinese Industrial Handbook for Zhejiang Province , published in 1933, supplies farm wage data for both male and female workers in the counties of Yin, Yuyao, and Fenghua. Table 8.1, where the data are displayed,^[27] dramatizes gender differences in the farm labor market. Wage rates for males were relatively integrated across county boundaries; wage rates for females were not. The highest farm wages for men were reported in Yin County, the most urbanized county, where seasonal variation was also sharpest; farm wages for women were highest in Yuyao, the county where commercial cotton was king. What accounts for these differences?

The lack of integration in female wage labor markets was partly due to local variation in the norms forbidding female farm labor. In urbanized Yin County, the home of Ningbo City, women never took jobs as farm workers—

[26] CIH:C , p. 193.

[27] Data from ZSZZ 1933, section yi , pp. 42–45. Though it is not relevant to this table, readers should take note that men and women received different kinds and amounts of food when they performed agricultural labor on the gong shan system that included board and sometimes room (see Luo Qiong, p. 21). Also, wage rates presented in Feng Hefa, ed., Zhongguo nongcun jingji ziliao (Materials on the Chinese rural economy; Shanghai, 1933), 2:746–47 for all long-term farm workers in the three counties show Yin County wages ranging from 41 to 90 yuan per year; from 35 to 61 in Fenghua; from 30 to 72 in Yuyao; all figures are based on a system where meals were supplied in addition to a cash wage. The Feng Hefa figures cast some doubt on the veracity of the relatively high wage rate shown for female workers in Yuyao. The figures for Yin County presented in ZSZZ may also be misleading because they present a low and high range, while the other numbers probably represent means. Notes appended to the table state that the top figure of 1 yuan for day labor was paid at peak season only.

at least so noted the statisticians who reported wages in the Chinese Industrial Handbook for Zhejiang Province . Moreover, women did not travel far from home to work in the fields; otherwise female wage rates would have been comparable across counties. With urban jobs competing for long-term male workers, and with families reluctant to send women out to do hard labor in the fields,^[28] it appears that Yuyao farmers were forced to offer higher wages to attract female workers. They were needed: cotton, Yuyao's major commercial crop, was a labor-intensive crop that consumed more labor days per year than any other commercial crop grown in the area.^[29]

Differences in wage rates for male and female farm workers in Fenghua and Yuyao dramatize the limited mobility of female farm workers. Wages for male farm workers in Fenghua ranged from 80 percent to 83 percent of wages in Yuyao. But female farm workers in Fenghua could expect to earn only half as much as their Yuyao counterparts for day labor. In Fenghua, a female farm worker paid by the month made only 44 percent of what local women

[28] On the generally high wages for farm labor in this competitive labor market, see Feng Hefa, ed., Zhongguo nongcun jingji ziliao (Shanghai, 1933), 2:741, 753. Historically, the growth of the home weaving industry has been shown to draw female labor away from agriculture. See Evelyn Sakakida Rawski, Agricultural Change and the Peasant Economy of South China (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), pp. 46–47, 54–55.

[29] John Lossing Buck, Land Utilization in China: Statistical Volume (Nanking, 1937), pp. 314–19, reports that cotton cultivation consumed 225 labor days; only garlic consumed more labor per crop hectare in Yuyao, and garlic occupied less than 1 percent of seasonal crop area, as against more than 90 percent for cotton (pp. 193–99). The next contender for crop acreage in Yuyao, broad beans (occupying more than 66 percent of seasonal crop area), consumed only 102 days of labor a year. Most of the work in cotton cultivation went to harrowing and cultivating (43 percent) and harvesting (38 percent). See p. 320.

earned in Yuyao; and for Fenghua women who contracted their labor by the year, wages were scarcely more than a third of comparable rates in Yuyao. If women had moved out of Fenghua to Yuyao for farm work, these wage differentials would have disappeared. At the other end of the spectrum, in Yin County, where city influence on village custom was greatest, and where commercial cropping took second place to fishing and handicrafts (especially furniture making, woodworking, and straw mat and hat making), "virtually no women hired out for farm labor."^[30]

In short, a young woman's prospects in the labor market were constrained not only by class but also by the location of her town or village in the spatial economy of the region. Whether these different labor markets were due to taboos on women's travel and farm labor or to a lack of information about the job market, or to a combination of these, is not clear from wage data alone. But examining other sectors of the female labor market shows that taboos were important.

Other Female Labor Markets

Given the absence of women from the agricultural wage labor force in Yin County, and the high wages required to lure women into field labor in Yuyao, we would expect to find a thriving market for female labor outside agriculture in the Ningbo region. Prostitution, domestic service, and home handicrafts all were options open to women in the preindustrial economy, depending on the needs and the sensibilities of their families. Prostitution was not respectable, though it could be lucrative. By contrast, respectable women of many skills and backgrounds worked part-time or full-time as Ningbo maids. And at the pinnacle of the female employment structure stood home handicrafts, crowned by that prestigious craft that was really an art, embroidery.^[31] We shall examine each in turn.

Prostitution and Domestic Service

Prostitution supported untold numbers of women in Ningbo, but information on the conditions of their work, employment, and recruitment is scanty in sources that were written primarily to celebrate the virtues of local residents. The 1877 Yin County gazetteer does include a description of prosperous brothels, under the heading "Odious Customs."^[32] A former resident of Ding-

[30] ZSZZ, yi , p. 44. A survey conducted in the 1930s notes: "As for long-term labor in eastern Zhejiang, few women do it, because the women are not good at working in the fields [bushan yu congshi tianjian laodong ]. Children commonly do field labor, their jobs being limited to tending cattle and feeding pigs, chickens, and ducks." See Feng Hefa, ed., Zhongguo , 2:739.

[31] On the prestige of embroidery work, see comments in Feng Hefa, ed., Zhongguo , 1:243, 301–2, citing a report dated 1930.

[32] Xinxiu Yin xianzhi , 1877, 2:9a.

hai County reported disapprovingly in his memoirs that prostitutes (not local women) descended on his native place three times a year during the peak fishing season.^[33] A government tax survey conducted in Yin County in 1939 listed three classes of prostitutes in Ningbo: "first-class" prostitutes paid the state 12 yuan a month in taxes, and third-class prostitutes were assessed from 4 to 6 yuan .^[34] First-class prostitutes' taxes alone may have matched the total monthly earnings of a male farm laborer.

Respectable women scorned prostitution even in the face of dire poverty.^[35] But domestic work as a cook, servant, or nursemaid was acceptable for both married and unmarried women. The memoirs of a long-time resident of Ningbo fondly recall eight famous types of "Ningbo maids," ranging from scullery maids, who did the cooking, washing, and cleaning, to the more genteel household helpers, who catered to the intimate personal needs of their employers. Those who labored as scullery maids came from poor families, performing heavy work for low wages, but other servants were drawn from across the spectrum of working-class households. For many, domestic service did not involve onerous physical labor. It doubtless had hidden costs: upper-class women were notorious for abusing their female servants, and male employers often expected free sexual access to the household help. Still, job descriptions for some of these maids (even allowing for the undeniable bias of the informant, who clearly felt they were paid too much for doing too little) suggest that theirs was mainly a seller's market.^[36] Competing opportunities for women in other sectors of the economy may actually have improved the wages of Ningbo maids in their local area as the industrial and commercial economy expanded.^[37]

At the same time, the range of female domestic work in Ningbo hints at the immense gaps that separated rich and poor women. The servant who ground rice, hauled water, and spent mealtimes hunched over charcoal burners lived a world apart from her mistress and even from the body servant who attended her employer. At marriage a leisured young lady was accompanied to her spouse's residence by a "dowry maid," specially chosen by her

[33] See Jin Limen, "Lüetan Zhoushan de hunjia fengsu," in Zhang Xingzhou, ed., Ningbo xisu congtan , p. 222.

[34] See Yinxian yiban xingzheng gaikuang , cited in Nimpo chiku jittai chosasho (1941).

[35] Ning Lao T'ai T'ai, the subject of Ida Pruitt's Daughter of Han (New Haven, 1945), became a beggar and finally a domestic servant when she went out to work for the first time (p. 73) to keep her family from starving. She never considered prostitution. But see Gail Hershatter, "Prostitution and the Market in Women in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai," in Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society , ed. Rubie S. Watson and Patricia Buckley Ebrey (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991), p. 18, on defining respectability and its problems. As she points out, we still know very little about how prostitution was viewed by peasant families.

[36] The account that follows is based on Tang Kangxiong, "Ningbo de niumu," pp. 256–57.

[37] The Dinghai xianzhi, fangsu : 51a, remarks that by the early 1920s, textile factory jobs were becoming more important than domestic service to emigrating female workers.

parents from their own household servants. Such a servant had to be both young and very capable, for she might serve her young mistress for life. Her position was like that of a sister or confidante: "these maids were exactly like the body servants found in official families in the old days." At holiday time, or during funerals or weddings, household servants, including the dowry maids, got help from "temporaries"—women recruited from poor families where small children and domestic chores prevented them from taking full-time jobs. After working two or three days, a temporary maid took home a daily wage and usually a generous bonus. In the words of one observer (evidently a former employer of temporary help): "Although they do not work so many days, their income does not necessarily reflect this."

As for status, a body servant enjoyed leisure and even luxury, though at the price of servitude. Her economic status may have been higher than that of the temporary help, but her formal social status was beneath that of married women from commoner households who worked as temporary maids or nursemaids. Maid service gave the well-to-do leisure; it gave poor women jobs that were less arduous and better paying than farm work; it offered alternatives to prostitution; and it provided long-term security in a market where most farm and factory jobs were both seasonal and unstable. Working as a maid could be a respectable prelude to marriage in Ningbo. And maid takers were in some cases also maid givers; for instance, nursemaids who attended Ningbo mothers after childbirth hired their own nursemaids during confinement. All these factors make it difficult to generalize about the impact of domestic service on women's status. In any case, maid service remained both a secure and a widely accepted form of respectable work for commoner women—a clear step above prostitution, a cut below the most respectable form of women's work, home handicrafts.

Home Handicrafts

Women's work in family enterprises crossed class lines in Ningbo. Descriptions of "middle-class" households^[38] demonstrate the crucial role of women's work in the preindustrial household and also underscore the advantages enjoyed by households commanding a large female labor force. A survey of Ningbo industry conducted in 1907 by Nyok-Ching Tsur, a Ningbo native, identified a distinctive mode of production unique to Ningbo's middle-class families. During the period of his study, home production supplied each family's needs for preserved foods, cotton cloth, and yarn, with some to spare for the market. At the turn of the century, in fact, well-off households in

[38] See Tsur, "Forms of Business." During this period, references to the Ningbo "middle class" were common in the press. For instance, in 1907 a new French steamer line became a financial success by catering to the needs of middle- and upper-class travelers between Ningbo and Shanghai, according to the North-China Herald , March 15, 1907: 548–49.

Ningbo were growing, storing, and processing their own rice, either for cakes or for rice flour. It was common for such families to process their own cotton. Tsur estimated that 40 percent of households that supplied their own cloth even grew their own raw cotton: men did the cleaning and drying, women the spinning and weaving.^[39]

Women spun together in an enclosed courtyard, working late into the night unless they had to stop to put young children to bed. The division of labor among them was elaborate: "almost every woman spins a special quality yarn for a particular cloth." Weavers used several different kinds of loom, one type requiring the labor of three or four women working with both hands and feet; the simplest loom, a hand loom, calling for only one pair of hands. In one apparently lineage-scale enterprise, 60 to 70 women were producing 40 different kinds of cloth. Individuals within the household also specialized in the products they made: scarves and shawls using coarse cotton were the preserve of the nearsighted or the novice; young girls whose eyesight was still sharp worked on the fine multicolored embroidery.^[40]

Women's work brought income to these households, and it had sentimental value as well—at least to the men. The elaborate division of labor was an emblem of the organic unity—Tsur called it the "harmonic congeniality"—of the grand Chinese family. "While the girls and women sit working diligently, the men read aloud some amusing poem or tell the news from the city, so that the evening passes in a hurry."^[41] The gender division of labor in these exemplary Chinese families represented a perfect synthesis of Confucian family values and profit-making enterprise. Hierarchies of gender, age, and skill were reproduced and displayed every day in the work performed by women.

But during the early twentieth century, household economies were changing in response to new markets. Though the majority of families continued producing goods for their own use, saving extra income for the dowries of their daughters,^[42] some households were attracted to more entrepreneurial ventures. In cotton-growing areas, weaving households could engage in barter, with two families exchanging their own products (towels for clothing, for instance) through a female broker well known to both parties. Family production systems also lost ground to imported factory goods. Cloth woven at home, for instance, was threatened by the import of British, American, and Japanese textiles.^[43] Increasingly, the test of survival for any home industry appeared to be its ability to compete in international markets. Consequently,

[39] Tsur, "Forms of Business," pp. 45–46.

[40] Ibid., p. 46.

[41] Ibid., p. 47.

[42] Large farm families preserved great quantities of meat and vegetables—especially salted pork and fish and pickled cabbages—selling what they could not use. Ibid., p. 49.

[43] Ibid., p. 99.

even those households already producing for local or regional markets were forced to adopt new approaches to marketing.

Brokers employed by foreign companies and by new Chinese firms moved quickly to meet the needs of households trying to tap the commercial market; they also solicited and even trained contract workers in the home.^[44] In many handicraft industries, contractors hired brokers to go house to house, linking individual household enterprises with the shifting domestic and international demand for their products. Brokers collected finished and semifinished goods manufactured in the home, under contract or on commission: paper umbrellas, straw hats, mats made from the local esparto grass (hundreds of mu of these rushes were planted in fields outside the city), and embroidery. Women were the mainstay of all these home industries.^[45]

Under these new market conditions, demand stayed high for bamboo umbrella frames made at home by men and women (women sorting the pieces, men building the frames).^[46] Female mat weavers, using rushes grown only in China, also kept their customers both at home and abroad. But something had changed. Mat weavers now began working to order, following the exact specifications of a contractor: "now every women knows at once how long, how thick, and how smooth the individual threads of bast must be to correspond with the contractor's wishes."^[47]

Embroidery arts entered the market for the first time as a result of foreign demand. Silk embroidery—the emblem of refined womanhood—was discovered by foreign missionaries during the 1860s, and by the end of the century, contractors were purchasing huge quantities for customers at home and in Europe. Embroiderers bought their own supplies and worked their own designs, while 16 "embroidery collectors" vied for their output. The new commercial market for fine embroidery in Ningbo "found welcome support among the women and girls of the middle class. Whereas women formerly had embroidered just to pass the time, they now were offered a rewarding side occupation by the embroidery collectors."^[48]

[44] On brokers and their role in the economy of this period, see Susan Mann, "Brokers as Entrepreneurs in Presocialist China," Comparative Studies in Society and History 26, no. 4 (1984): 614–36.

[45] Tsur, "Forms of Business," pp. 23, 25, 29.

[46] Ibid., pp. 96–97.

[47] Ibid., p. 100.

[48] Ibid., p. 101. Jane Schneider has shown that in nineteenth-century Sicily, the commercial availability of manufactured cloth freed women of nonelite families to pursue the noble art of embroidery for the first time. Obviously Tsur drew a different conclusion about the relationship between class and embroidery in Ningbo, and his data do not permit me to press Schneider's questions. The case of the lace makers, discussed below, demonstrates that at least some women began doing commercial needlework for the first time during Ningbo's early industrialization. In China, as in Sicily, embroidery was both a status symbol and an emblem of female seclusion, but I have seen no evidence that lace making conferred similar prestige. The bride's trousseau in accounts I have read did not include handmade lacework. See Jane Schneider, "Trousseau as Treasure: Some Contradictions of Late Nineteenth-Century Change in Sicily," Women and History , 1985, no. 10:81–119. A detailed description of trousseaux in Ningbo appears in Tang Kangxiong, "Peijia zhuanglian," in Zhang Xingzhou, ed., Ningbo xisu congtan (Taibei, 1973), pp. 212–14.

Sometime after the turn of the century, a new group of middlemen entered this market as well. Professional contractors began supplying the embroiderers with silk, designs, and embroidery frames, paying piece rates for finished work. Commissioned pieces invited yet a new division of labor, as households began to specialize in different designs (animals, figures, flowers). Within the household, each female embroiderer cultivated her own specialty, so that work on an individual piece might be divided up among members. In this market, the families who divided their skills most efficiently produced the best work and made the most money. "The more clever the distribution [of labor], the more beautiful the work, and the higher also the wage paid by the contractor."^[49]

Women in the embroidery business divided their labor according to age, skill, and leisure. In the largest family enterprises, the most productive workers were widows under 60 and girls under 20—that is, unmarried or unattached women who could devote most of their time to their work. Some of their income was set aside for their own use. Young girls did embroidery and made silk shoes to earn money for their dowries; widows used their income to supplement the allowance they received from lineage trusts before they became eligible for full support. Married women with husband and family to attend, by contrast, were able to work only part-time at handicraft enterprises, and the disposition of their income is less clear.^[50]

Household production on this scale required managerial as well as manual skills. Small embroidery projects, for instance, took 15 days; a wall hanging or curtain required up to three months. The mother or the senior female in the household negotiated contracts for daughters, daughters-in-law, and other workers (who might include concubines, adopted girls, and live-in servants).^[51] She also supervised the labor and took responsibility for meeting deadlines and other specifications. She negotiated terms with the embroidery contractors, who employed collection agents to check on work, deliver raw materials and orders, and collect and pay for orders. The marketing center for this home-based embroidery business was likely to be a wholesale outlet located in a large city, with branches elsewhere for retail sales. Traveling salesmen sold the embroidery in towns where there were no permanent

[49] Tsur, "Forms of Business," p. 103.

[50] Ibid., p. 121.

[51] See Ibid., pp. 33–36, for a description of the "service-children" purchased by "mandarins and rich merchants" from families unable to support them.

stores. Women's embroidery, the hallmark of late Qing domesticity, had entered the world market.

Lace making, unlike embroidery, was a new women's handicraft industry, introduced during the mid-nineteenth century when Roman Catholic sisters began teaching it to Chinese peasant girls. Lace making eventually employed 1,000 women making handkerchiefs, cushion covers, and other items for export. Though the French managers of the fledgling lace industry conducted their affairs "with some secrecy," Chinese women in neighboring villages soon took up the art and local businessmen got wind of it. By 1936 more than 2,000 Ningbo lace makers were at work supplying over 30 contractors, with perhaps another 1,000 women making lace in the neighboring counties of Zhenhai and Ciqi. Piece rates in 1936 ranged from 0.30 yuan to 4 yuan for each article; monthly earnings averaged over 10 yuan per person, placing lace making well within the range of male farm wages and far above even the best-paid female farm jobs.^[52]

Straw hat weaving was one of the Ningbo area's oldest home crafts. Before the opening of foreign trade, the Ningbo region was known for a special grass known as "mat grass," which is still grown in the Ningbo area as a third crop and is exported to Japan for tatami. This grass could also be woven into sturdy, weather-resistant, broad-brimmed hats for farm work. Easily made (one weaver could make up to five in a day), these hats were a major sideline in farm households.^[53]

Unfortunately, the only detailed data on the production of straw hats dates from the early twentieth century, well after new marketing systems and raw materials had created a European market for Ningbo hats. The first major change came in the 1880s, when a market for Ningbo-made farmers' hats first developed in London and Paris; it developed somewhat later in New York. In 1908 Ningbo women were already producing 6 million straw and woven bamboo hats for export abroad and shipping an equal number inland to Chinese customers in the interior. Locally grown straw was picked and cleaned by workers employed by a contractor, then delivered to home weavers in huge bundles, along with samples to copy. The largest market for these hats was in farm villages in present-day Vietnam.^[54]

[52] Yinxian tongzhi , 1936, "Shihuo zhi," pp. 57a–b. This commission work, in which the contractor supplied the design (drawn by male designers), produced hundreds of thousands of pieces for export each year. Exposure to this market meant risk: the local lace-making industry went on to peak between 1923–27; thereafter, a slide in production brought prices and volume down from 80 cents a meter in 1923 to 22 cents a meter in 1933. See CIH:C , pp. 539–40.

[53] Unless otherwise specified, the information on hat weaving that follows is drawn from a preprint of a volume in a new series on Chinese domestic industry and commerce currently in preparation at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. The volume I cite is titled Shanghai Huashang guoji maoyi ye , first draft, fourth section, third volume (chugao, disi zhang, sanci ) in the series Zhongguo ziben zhuyi gongshangye shiliao congkan.

[54] Tsur, "Forms of Business," pp. 104–5.

Major changes in the hat industry followed during World War I, when a French company based in Shanghai introduced two grasses—a type of ramie (macao ) and a fine pale grass called "gold thread" (jinsi )—from the Philippines. To train women to weave with these imported materials, the French company sent a delegation of women workers to Manila in 1914 to observe Filipina workers.^[55] Between 1914 and 1923, Shanghai exports of Ningbo hats made from ramie and gold thread increased tenfold. To popularize the new materials and new weaving techniques, the company, Yongxing (Eternally Flourishing), set up weaver-training centers in Roman Catholic churches. Successful education of local weavers made it possible for Yongxing to develop a putting-out system in which (male) company agents distributed raw materials and samples to women workers at their homes. Two or three women workers at the company's Ningbo branch worked at a shop in the city, stamping the shape of the hats with a machine and finishing off the edges and trimming.

These new materials and new markets brought home weavers higher prices for hats. But the new hats were harder to fashion. Whereas ordinary straw hats could be made in a few hours, a gold-thread hat took up to a week to finish. The new grasses were razor-sharp, and they easily cut fingers. Japanese women weavers, according to some sources, refused to use them, and even in the Ningbo area, gold-thread hat weaving moved quickly from the protoindustrial center "Outside West Gate," where most of the weaving was concentrated, to counties where poverty made women willing to tolerate the pain. Within a few years, Yuyao County, together with Huangyan County to the south of the Ningbo area—considered peripheral counties by Ningbo cityfolk—became the major production center for gold-thread hats.^[56]

The production side of this hat market, which was at its peak in 1927 and declined steadily during the 1930s, looked something like this. Hat companies (one in Ningbo, which monopolized the local sale of raw materials and the purchase of finished hats; five or more in Shanghai, which sold raw materials or purchased finished hats direct from brokers operating in the countryside) relied on a brokered putting-out system. Each company supervised up to 20 brokers, the broker himself being a skilled hat weaver. The broker supplied women with straw and collected hats on a piece-rate basis from about 50 households with which he was well acquainted. An experienced worker earned between 1.50 and 2.00 yuan for every hat she could make. Since one hat took the best workers about five days, hat weaving was more profitable than farm labor for women, except in Yuyao.^[57] A weaver

[55] Shanghai Huashang guoji maoyi ye , p. 6.

[56] Ibid., pp. 13, 16.

[57] Output for less experienced workers was about three hats a month. CIH:C , p. 687. See SSZ , 13:657–58, which reports ordinary straw hats that could be made in half a day or less, selling for between two and four American copper coins each.

could expect up to 20 yuan a month when business was good; 10 yuan per month was the average.^[58] Though in Yuyao female farm workers could earn more than hat weavers, the stigma attached to women's farm work compromised the value of the income.^[59] Hat weaving was easier than farm work; it could be done year-round; and it kept women indoors (a prestige factor as well as a practical advantage, because it allowed women at home to manage household chores, child care, and other tasks at the same time). The advantages of hat weaving even without wage incentives are obvious.

Raw materials and orders for hats came through brokers, but training was generally in-house, supplied by female family members. Mothers, or mothers-in-law, purchased straw and grasses and collected payments. Hat-weaving women had only limited access to information, and of course they had no mobility in the market. They never left home; they believed that going out was immoral, improper, and impermissible.^[60]

Hat weaving was peasant work. Training was short ("An ordinary person can learn to make hats in two weeks," commented one observer). Children could do it: young girls started weaving at the age of 8 sui , that is, between six and seven years old. And the work was rough: hat weavers developed thick calluses to protect their fingers against the sharp grass. By contrast, home embroidery was elite women's work, more art than craft. Training was long, requiring years of leisure: young girls began practicing at the age of 10 so they could turn out elegant pillowcases by the age of 16. The tiny needles and delicate fabrics demanded small, fine hands and smooth fingers—hands only a woman free from hard labor could aspire to. Embroidery thus marked a distinctive class line in home craft production, a line underscored by a close look at the work of hat weavers.

Whether they were embroiderers or hat weavers, however, women with access to the handicraft market subscribed to the same values: they were working respectably at home. Nyok-Ching Tsur opined, in fact, that one of the main reasons for the rise of contracting in the Ningbo area was its popularity among women who preferred to work at home rather than accept jobs outside.

[58] Yinxian tongzhi (1936), "Shihuozhi," p. 58a. In interviews with eight retired hat weavers in Ciqi County, November 1988, I heard complaints about the effect of the war on their business. One woman told us that in the 1940s, when hat prices fell by more than half, she measured her income in bowls of rice: one hat bought three bowls.

[59] See the figures in ZSZZ, yi , pp. 43–48.

[60] During interviews with eight retired hat weavers in Ciqi County in November 1988, I asked about going out. "Did you go to plays?" "Never." "Did you ever go to Shanghai?" "Shanghai?! We never heard of going to Shanghai!" These women obtained materials from and sold their products to a broker from the same company every week or month, at rates set by the standards of the company. So removed were they from the city at the center of the prefecture where they lived that when asked what the special traits of Ningbo women were, they replied, "We don't know: we aren't from Ningbo."

A special characteristic of Chinese women and girls is their great shyness. They are not fond of serving in strange, distinguished houses, the more so since the earnings there are small. They prefer to remain at home, where they can find better-paying work without being deprived of their family life. Naturally, there are also women and girls in China who are employed in factories or who earn their livelihood as wage workers; but these are exceptional cases.^[61]

Even the famous "Ningbo maids," by remaining in the confines of the domestic realm, escaped some of the stigma attached to "going out." Work in the home was a mark of female respectability in Ningbo, and it was a mark recognized by women of all classes.^[62]

In sum, the early twentieth century saw a commercial revolution in women's home industries in the Ningbo area, a commercial revolution based on contracting to household workers. Contemporary observers criticized contractors for driving independent artisans out of business.^[63] But contracting, it appears, actually expanded economic opportunities for a wide range of female home workers, precisely because local custom confined them to the household, where they had no mobility and limited access to materials and information.^[64]

Factory Jobs

Ningbo belonged to a region in China where women entered the factory work force in large numbers during the early twentieth century.^[65] Within the Ningbo area itself, taboos on women's work outside the home were strong,

[61] Tsur, "Forms of Business," p. 92.

[62] Other ethnographers have noted the relationship between women's home handicraft industry and middle class status. See, for example, Fei Hsiao-tung and Chang Chih-i, Earthbound China: A Study of Rural Economy in Yunnan (Chicago, 1945), p. 240.

[63] See Tsur, "Forms of Business," p. 93. Independent craftworkers could no longer survive, because of the need for capital to purchase raw materials in bulk to meet market demand and because of the problem of acquiring information about rapidly changing market conditions. Overall, Tsur complains (p. 91), the image of China as a land of domestic workers and independent artisans was—in his area, at that time—a figment of the uninformed observer's imagination. Most of those seemingly independent workers, he stresses, were actually employed by contractors.

[64] Women, of course, paid the price of dependency in other ways. For example, my informants complained bitterly that during the war, after Japan occupied the Philippines, imports of gold-thread grass were cut off, and they had to find some other source of income.

[65] The region referred to here is the Lower Yangzi macroregion, including the cities of Shanghai, Nanjing, Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Ningbo (see n. 13 above). Most of the workers in Shanghai's cotton mills in the early twentieth century were women, and women workers were hired by the thousands as new factories opened elsewhere in the region. By contrast, in North China, female factory workers made up only a negligible part of the urban work force until much later. On north-south differences and temporal change in patterns of female factory work, see Gail Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin, 1900–1949 (Stanford, 1986), esp. pp. 54–57. On women cotton mill workers in Shanghai, see Honig, Sisters and Strangers .

and only the poorest households sent women to factories. Yet even where women remained at home, new factories altered the household division of labor.

In the first place, the increasing availability of factory-made goods meant that in 1908 "items which the women in Ningpo produced themselves as recently as thirty years ago, e.g., shoes, finer fabrics, and bags, are in most cases bought in shops today."^[66] Added this contemporary observer, "Only one generation ago, the women made shoes, hats, shirts, and other apparel for their husbands and for themselves. It caused much attention in Ningpo at that time when a young woman bought from a merchant something that she could have manufactured herself through the diligence of her hands. Today this has become very different."^[67] Because factory products made some forms of housework obsolete, in short, factories brought well-to-do women more leisure. Factory-made products for the home also freed women to devote more energy to home handicraft production for the market.

For the poorest households, on the other hand, factories offered new jobs. By 1919 the city of Ningbo boasted four factories large enough to command the attention of Japanese investigators surveying the local economy: two cotton-spinning mills, an electric power plant, and an oil-pressing plant.^[68] Tongjiuyuan, a Chinese-owned cotton mill and the first of its kind in the province, was founded in 1895 as a patriotic enterprise by two prominent local businessmen, after China's defeat in the war with Japan. It opened as a cotton-ginning plant and gradually expanded into spinning after 1900.^[69] Tongjiuyuan employed 1,300 workers, 1,000 of them women. The 300 male employees received monthly wages of 4–10 American dollars in 1919; women were paid by the day, from 8 to 20 cents in American copper pennies.^[70] The coarse yarn the plant produced, used only in local cloth manufacture, was sold mostly within Zhejiang Province. The other cotton mill, Hefeng, was founded in 1905 as a Sino-Japanese joint venture, originally organized along Japanese lines under the protection of the Japanese consulate. The company opened with 23,000 American-made spindles in 1907, spinning raw cotton grown in Yuyao and Shaoxing counties to the west. Seventy percent of its 2,600 workers were women, paid by the day or on a piece-rate basis. The company supplied temporary housing in a dormitory for all workers.

Women factory workers in Ningbo suffered the stigma attached to women who went out to work in a public place. Moreover, their wages were relatively

[66] Tsur, "Forms of Business," p. 33.

[67] Ibid., p. 61.

[68] SSZ , 13:45.

[69] For a time the company also tried weaving cloth, but in 1919, in the wake of a fire and a takeover by a rival company, textile production in the plant was abandoned.

[70] SSZ , 13:636–42; CIH:C , p. 482. The Tongjiuyuan and Hefeng mills both paid wages in American currency, for reasons I have not yet been able to determine.

low. Although pay rates in the Ningbo mills were said to be "about the same" as those in Shanghai, an experienced female worker could earn only between 20 and 25 cents (American copper coins) a day twisting thread or carding cotton. Reelers were paid about 8 cents a day. Floor supervisors fared better, earning monthly wages of 32 yuan .^[71] In other words, at Hefeng and at Tongjiuyuan, local factory wages and terms (with the exception of the privileged job of supervisor) paid no more than home handicrafts for many workers. And by removing women from the home, factory jobs exacted a premium that discounted the real value of their wages. Sending a woman "out" not only compromised a family's status but also forced it to forgo her domestic services or replace them with the labor of someone else.^[72]

Irregular hours and plant closings were as common as low wages in Ningbo's factories. The cottonseed oil–pressing plant with financial ties to the Tongjiuyuan cotton mill catered to a limited provincial market, and shut its doors during the first four months of every year to await the new cotton harvest. Workers in the mill, when it was open, earned about 10 yuan a month, working 12-hour shifts.^[73] A small match factory, a candle factory, a shop that made towels, and a feeble electric plant (closed more often than not) also kept erratic schedules. The Zhengdaxin Match Factory, established in 1912 (some sources say 1909) by a French missionary and subsequently taken over by Chinese managers, employed about 70 male workers at 30 cents a day, along with 150 female workers who packaged the matches on a piece-rate basis. Women workers earned 1 cent for 100 boxes, with efficient workers turning out 2,400–2,500 boxes a day. Making boxes smeared with phosphorous paste for striking matches paid 2 cents for 60 but took longer, so that daily earnings peaked at about 20 cents. Here again contractors opened doors by helping women respond to erratic factory schedules: efficient women workers could earn daily wages comparable to those of relatively skilled mill workers by making match boxes at home under contract to the match factory.^[74]

[71] See SSZ , 13:47. Again, it is not clear why floor supervisors were paid in Chinese currency while line workers were paid in American money.

[72] Stephen Hymer and Stephen Resnick, "A Model of an Agrarian Economy with Nonagricultural Activities," American Economic Review 59, no. 4, pt. 1 (1969): 493–506, present an economist's model of these domestic services, which they call Z goods. Z goods are "nonagricultural nonleisure activities" designed to meet the household's needs for food, clothing, shelter, entertainment, and ceremony. Although Hymer and Resnick's analysis makes no specific reference to gender roles, their description of Z goods makes it clear that women's work accounts for the bulk of these activities.

[73] SSZ , 13:47–48. The sex of these workers is not specified in the source, but if female workers were included, this would have been noted. I have yet to identify a source specifying monthly wages for female factory workers in Ningbo. Females, with the exception of supervisors, appear to have received exclusively day rates.

[74] Ibid., 13:653–54.

No wonder that even as these new factories came into being, women's home handicraft industries remained vigorous. Work at home offered numerous advantages for women, and the demand for home-manufactured goods remained strong. At the close of World War I, the market for traditional handicrafts still flourished, with some commodities even expanding their foreign or domestic markets. Home-woven textiles, for instance, succumbed to competition from factory-made goods, as "local cloth" (Yong bu ), once widely sold in North China, was displaced by Japanese imports. However, home weavers turned to new types of cloth, which they marketed successfully up the Yangzi for a wider clientele. Straw hats and mats remained at the top of the list of local specialties, along with embroidery, fishnets, and joss paper.^[75]

In sum, as long as factories did not offer competitive wages or steady employment, and as long as female seclusion remained a mark of status, Ningbo women who had a choice would have seen no reason to abandon home handicrafts for jobs outside the home.^[76] Home handicrafts made on contract continued to flourish on a large scale alongside Ningbo's small but growing industrial sector. Local factories could not compete for workers against domestic employment for many reasons. They employed mostly day labor and closed periodically. They required women to work outside the home among strangers. They demanded new skills. Home handicraft industries, by contrast, did not take women away from their homes or from their customary work there—cooking, cleaning, caring for the sick, bearing children, babysitting, mending and making clothes, and keeping their menfolk company. Nyok-Ching Tsur's ideal of "harmonic congeniality" in the household economy survived for both practical and sentimental reasons.

Which Ningbo women did take factory jobs? Not middle-class women, who remained respectably at home. The few thousand women who entered local factories in Ningbo came from poor households strategizing to keep their menfolk afloat. Part-time women workers from such households, recruited locally—usually through female relatives—made up the female labor force that staffed Ningbo's earliest factories.^[77] They were paid by the day.

[75] According to the Yinxian tongzhi ("Shihuozhi," pp. 57–58), the volume of exports of straw hats fell from nearly 5 million units in 1927 to about 1.5 million in 1930 and 1931; it was still falling in 1932.

[76] Writing in 1908, after one factory had already been operating for a decade, Nyok-Ching Tsur ("Forms of Business," p. 111) saw no threat to the household enterprises and their contractors, though he praised the patriotism of factory founders.

[77] See CIH:C , pp. 490, 495. In interviews with eight retired women workers from the Hefeng mill, conducted in Ningbo in November 1988, informants commonly named a mother or a mother-in-law as the person who got them their jobs. Some worked to put brothers through school, others to support male kin who were apparently unemployed.

Their output served mainly the domestic market.^[78] They remained under the close supervision of their families, a world apart from the women who migrated to Shanghai to labor in the mills. Moreover, since they worked close to home, workers in Ningbo factories were always at the beck and call of the family if their labor was needed urgently at home. High absentee rates meant they were readily fired. And they carried the classic double burden, arriving home after a 12-hour day to find menfolk hungry for a meal and complaining about the late hour.^[79]

Migration and the Female Labor Force

Only the poorest Ningbo families seem to have sent women to work in local factories. But women workers in Ningbo factories seem to have had no access to the Shanghai factory labor market.^[80] Though it remains unclear which families sent women to Shanghai to work and what their status was, the gazetteer for Dinghai County, an island, claims that thousands of its own men and women migrated to Shanghai to work during the early twentieth century. And it is possible that jobs outside the home in Shanghai carried less of a stigma among Ningbo women who migrated there to work far from the prying eyes of local gossips.^[81]

The reasons for Shanghai's appeal are not difficult to find. Shanghai factories—regardless of Ningbo factory owners' claims—paid better wages than the Ningbo mills. According to a 1930s survey, female textile workers in Shanghai could expect to earn an average of slightly over 12 yuan per month; in Ningbo, as we have seen, monthly factory jobs for women during that time

[78] The Hefeng Cotton Spinning Mill, for instance, paid most of its workers—1,343 of 1,785 employees—by the day, only 20 by the month, and none by the year. CIH:C , p. 483. Yarn from the mill continued to supply local home weavers; it was too coarse to compete in the international market. Yarn from the Hefeng mill was sold in Guangxi, Guangdong, Sichuan, and Tianjin, as well as within Zhejiang Province (p. 485). Perhaps thousands more women were also employed by the factories to do piecework at home under contract, using raw materials supplied by their employers (p. 532).

[79] Comments by retired Hefeng mill workers, Ningbo, November 1988.

[80] Retired Hefeng mill workers told me that they were aware at the time that many Ningbo women went to Shanghai to work, but they had no way to get there themselves: "You had to have a relative, someone you knew, a connection, a route [yao you luzi ]."

[81] Abundant evidence for the presence of Ningbo women and men in the Shanghai work force suggests that the taboo on women going out to work may have been honored in the breach, at least by many women. See, for example, Dinghai xianzhi, fangsu : 51a, which mentions thousands of men and women from Dinghai County working in Shanghai and in Hankou. On Ningbo workers in Shanghai, see also references in Yuen Sang Leung, "Regional Rivalry in Mid-Nineteenth Century Shanghai: Cantonese vs. Ningpo Men," Ch'ing-shih wen-t'i 4, no. 8 (1982): 40; and Emily Honig, "The Politics of Prejudice: Subei People in Republican-Era Shanghai," Modern China 15, no. 3 (1989): 250–51.

were available only to supervisors.^[82] Moreover, many Ningbo workers had easy access to the Shanghai job market, following networks of kinship and friendship long since established by sojourning Ningbo entrepreneurs. In Shanghai, Ningbo's reputation for fostering discipline, hard work, and local pride made Ningbo workers desirable.^[83] As male Ningbo workers joined Ningbo's merchant elite abroad,^[84] their wives, daughters, sisters, and friends-of-friends followed. It was well known in Shanghai factories that Ningbo women did not have to find jobs through demeaning negotiations with labor contractors.^[85] One source suggests that Ningbo workers were placed through workers' associations (gonghui ), which guaranteed good service to the employer and screened working conditions for the employee.^[86] Ningbo maids and Ningbo factory workers benefited from the reputation of their native place throughout Shanghai.^[87] Women factory workers in the Shanghai cotton mills all understood that Ningbo recruits would be given the finer, higher-paying women's jobs.^[88] And Ningbo prostitutes in Shanghai

[82] Mukoyama Hiro, "Kyu Chugoku ni okeru rodo joken," Ajia kenkyu 8, no. 4 (1961): 42. Honig, Sisters and Strangers , p. 175, reports wages ranging from 14 yuan to 27 yuan per month for the top jobs in the Shanghai mills. The 1923 gazetteer for Dinghai County reported maids' monthly wages in Shanghai at 3–4 yuan , implying that already the mills were luring women out of domestic work and into the factories. See Dinghai xianzhi, fangsu : 51a. Note that real wage rates may have been less important than the promise of stable employment. Ningbo's factories were not a source of steady income.

[83] Honig, "Politics of Prejudice," pp. 258–59, argues persuasively that reputation was less important than personal connections and access to jobs in various levels of the Shanghai economy.

[84] On the rise of occupational associations composed of semiskilled workers in Shanghai, see the North-China Herald , July 18, 1910, p. 74. On the growth of the Ningbo working class in Shanghai, see also Susan Mann Jones, "The Ningpo Pang and Financial Power at Shanghai," in Mark Elvin and G. William Skinner, eds., The Chinese City Between Two Worlds (Stanford, 1974), pp. 86–88. Ningbo women working for Westerners in private homes earned 3 to 4 taels a month. Dinghai xianzhi, fangsu : 51a.

[85] See Honig, Sisters and Strangers , p. 97.

[86] Dinghai xianzhi, fangsu : 51a, mentions recruitment through gonghui but does not explain exactly how it worked.

[87] On regional stereotypes of factory workers in the Shanghai textile mills, see Honig, Sisters and Strangers , pp. 57–58 et passim; and Chu-fang Chang, "Chinese Cotton Mills in Shanghai," Chinese Economic Journal and Bulletin 3, no. 5 (1928): 907–8. Chang observes, "Most of the skilled hands employed in the engine rooms are Shanghai and Ningpo natives. Ningpo woman hands are more skilled than their sisters from other provinces."

[88] For more on the prestige of Ningbo women workers, see Honig, Sisters and Strangers , pp. 71, 75, 181. In interviews conducted in Shanghai in October 1988, some middle-class Ningbo women told me that most Ningbo women working in the factories at that time were there because of connections to the Green Gang. These informants insisted that factory work for women was not considered respectable by most Ningbo people. This may explain why the main gazetteer account of female factory workers in Shanghai comes from a peripheral Ningbo county, Dinghai.

served an exclusive clientele of merchants and officials from their native place, working in hotels instead of brothels.^[89]

Like the Subei region described by Emily Honig elsewhere in this volume, the Ningbo area produced its own distinctive labor market signs and linkages, channeling women workers out of the locality to jobs elsewhere. But unlike Subei people, who were consigned to the lowest-paying, most demeaning jobs, Ningbo people in Shanghai were distinguished by their ties to Shanghai's new bourgeoisie. Perhaps for that reason, it is extremely difficult to obtain precise information about the number and class background of Ningbo women factory workers. The respectable Ningbo woman was to stay at home while her menfolk went out to work to support her. Her presence in a factory was an embarrassment to her native place.

Conclusion

An economist called upon to "tell a story" explaining the fate of Ningbo women in the early twentieth-century household economy would have to take account not only of expanding access to international and domestic markets for the products of women's labor. The story would also have to point to region, class, and values as critical determinants of which women went out to work and where they went. While Ningbo women in better-off families clearly stood to benefit from the economic transformations of the early twentieth century, wives and daughters in poor households assumed a new double burden.^[90]

This chapter has not considered how the economic changes I have described may have undermined time-honored assumptions about women's place in the home in Ningbo.^[91] An untold part of my story therefore raises

[89] Hershatter, "Prostitution," discusses the Shanghai market for female prostitutes during this period. Ningbo prostitutes in Shanghai, privileged by the native-place ties discussed in this chapter, limited their sexual services to clients from their own native place: away from home, at least, they were elite members of a marginal social category.

[90] Of course a household that counted productive women among its members could not be considered the poorest of the poor, even in Ningbo. The very survival of females to maturity—the very existence of a female labor force within the domestic group—was a measure of a household's wherewithal. The poorest Ningbo families, forced to reduce expenditures, adjust family size to resources, and make plans for survival, put up their daughters for adoption as tongyangxi ("little daughters-in-law") and lost their labor before it became profitable. Even where the labor of mature females promised increasing income, therefore, the poorest households could not invest enough to rear daughters to maturity; among the poor, in the worst of times, even wives and mothers were expendable. During the depression years, "wife renting" was widely reported in the Ningbo area (Luo Qiong, "Zhongguo nongcunzhong," p. 22).

[91] Janet Salaff's and Susan Greenhalgh's research in Hong Kong and Taiwan, respectively, suggests that changing patterns of women's work barely impinge upon persistent beliefs in patriarchal authority and the primacy of males in the Chinese family. Honig, on the other hand, points to significant changes in the consciousness of women workers between the 1920s and 1940s, though she does not ask whether changing consciousness in the workplace led to changing domestic relations in the home. See Janet Salaff, Working Daughters of Hong Kong (New York, 1981); Susan Greenhalgh, "Sexual Stratification: The Other Side of 'Growth with Equity' in East Asia," Population and Development Review 11, no. 2 (1985): 265–314; and Honig, Sisters and Strangers , pp. 202–43.

another question: what were the effects of economic change on women's lives in other spheres? For example, the expansion of women's educational opportunities in the Ningbo area opened doors to some women whose place in the household and the economy was changing rapidly.^[92] A few Ningbo women, we know, became politically active; some embarked on new careers in the professions.^[93] But the vast majority of Ningbo women remained at the center of the household economy where, more than ever before, the nature of women's work marked the difference between economic failure and success.

[92] See, for example, a report in the North-China Herald , Aug. 2, 1907:249, detailing local movements for women's education in Ningbo. The report mentions a women's club presided over by the wife of the local daotai (circuit intendant) and observes that unbound feet were becoming "quite common" among ladies from official and gentry families. In a survey of women's education in China, Ida Belle Lewis notes that the first missionary school for girls in China was opened at Ningbo in 1844 (p. 18). Her map of the distribution of Protestant mission schools in 1918 shows more than 40 day schools in Ningbo and adjacent Shaoxing Prefectures. She has no data on private and public Chinese girls' schools for the same period in the Ningbo region, but given their rapid expansion during the period of her study, we can expect there were several. See Ida Belle Lewis, The Education of Girls in China (New York, 1919). Shina kaikojoshi (Tokyo 1922), 1:173–74, lists only two missionary schools for girls in Ningbo.

[93] In 1907, the young woman revolutionary Qiu Jin was executed in adjacent Shaoxing Prefecture. See the North-China Herald , Aug. 2, 1907: 249–50; for a fuller discussion, see Mary Backus Rankin, "The Emergence of Women at the End of the Ch'ing: The Case of Ch'iu Chin," in Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke, eds., Women in Chinese Society (Standford, 1975), pp. 39–66. On women's activism inspired by Qiu Jin, see R. Keith Schoppa, Chinese Elites and Political Change: Zhejiang Province in the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), p. 76. Research by Elizabeth Perry may show whether Ningbo women workers in Shanghai abandoned the traditional roles of their home area and threw themselves into radical political activity. Bryna Goodman's research in Shanghai has shown that professional Ningbo women's names appear in membership lists of the Ningbo guild activities in Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s. Personal conversations with Perry, Oct. 8, 1987; with Goodman, Oct. 6, 1987. See Bryna Goodman, "The Native Place and the City: Immigrant Consciousness and Organization in Shanghai, 1853–1927" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1990).

Nine
Native-Place Hierarchy and Labor Market Segmentation: the Case of Subei People in Shanghai

Emily Honig

Both historians and economists have long been concerned with the nature of social inequalities and the processes by which they are created. This inquiry has often focused on employment opportunities, documenting the vastly different conditions of work and rewards for labor experienced by various groups of people. Recognizing that not all people have access to the same sets of jobs, institutional economists began, in the decades after World War II, to describe distinct and exclusive labor markets.^[1] Peter Doeringer and Michael Piore, writing in the early 1970s, argued that labor markets were divided into a primary and a secondary sector. Jobs in the former offered relatively high wages, desirable working conditions, job stability, and potential for advancement. The secondary sector, however, was characterized by low-paying jobs, few benefits, no security, high rates of turnover, and poor working conditions.^[2] Subsequent scholars insisted that this theory of "dual" labor markets overlooked the multiplicity of labor market segmentation that existed.^[3] Richard Edwards, Michael Reich, and David Gordon, for example, defined three labor markets.^[4]

[1] An excellent summary of this literature is in Mark Granovetter and Charles Tilly, "Inequality and Labor Processes," New School for Social Research Working Paper Series 29 (July 1986).

[2] Peter Doeringer and Michael Piore, Internal Labor Markets and Manpower Analysis (New York, 1985), pp. 165–70.

[3] See Richard Edwards, Michael Reich, and David Gordon, eds., Labor Market Segmentation (Lexington, Mass., 1975). See also David Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (Cambridge, 1982).

[4] The three markets are most precisely described in Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1979), pp. 167–74. Piore accepted the notion of three labor markets, although he used slightly different labels: in addition to the secondary market, he describes an upper and a lower primary sector. See Michael Piore, "Notes for a Theory of Labor Market Stratification," in Edwards et al., Labor Market Segmentation , pp. 125–50.

Despite disagreements over the number of labor markets and the exact jobs associated with each, these economists all share a recognition that no single labor market exists to which everyone enjoys equal access. Furthermore, they agree that there are vast differences among the markets: positions in some are more privileged, lucrative, and secure than in others. Finally, they share a conviction that differences in the labor markets both reflect and reinforce inequalities among different social groups, defined usually by gender, race, ethnicity, religion, or nationality.

This paper explores the relationship between divided labor markets and social inequality in Shanghai during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although the components of the Shanghai labor market do not correlate in any precise way to those described in the United States, distinct and exclusive labor markets existed. The divisions were obvious and crucial to those who labored in Shanghai and are particularly apparent when we shift our focus beyond factory work to examine the labor market in its entirety.

Labor segmentation theory might appear unable to explain these divisions, because aside from the foreign presence, the working population of Shanghai was not divided by race, nationality, or religion as in the United States. Closer examination, though, shows that in Shanghai local origins played a role analogous to that played by ethnicity elsewhere. An analysis of the relationship between labor market segmentation and social inequality in Shanghai therefore requires an examination of the role of native-place identity.

Shanghai was a city composed primarily of immigrants, though not from across national boundaries. From 1885 to 1935, Shanghai natives accounted for an average of only 19 percent of the population of the International Concession and 26 percent of the population of the Chinese-owned parts of the city.^[5] As the city developed into a large commercial and industrial metropolis, laborers, merchants, and entrepreneurs came mostly from three areas: Guangdong, Jiangnan (the Ningbo/Shaoxing region of Zhejiang and the Wuxi/Changzhou area of Jiangsu), and Subei (the area of Jiangsu north of the Yangzi River and south of the Huai, sometimes called Jiangbei; see Map 9.1).^[6] Which of these areas one hailed from was critical in shaping work

[5] Zou Yiren, Jiu Shanghai renkou bianqiande yanjiu (Shanghai, 1980), pp. 112–13.

[6] Ibid. No standard definition of Subei exists. Most literally, it would include all of Jiangsu that lies north of the Yangzi River, from Haimen and Nantong in the south to Xuzhou in the northwestern corner. Most geographers, however, consider the part of the province north of the Huai (and the former bed of the Yellow River) to belong to Huaibei, a different geographic region. The distinction between Subei and Huaibei is based on language as well as geography: Xuzhou dialect (close to Shandong dialect) predominates north of the Huai, while Yangzhou dialect prevails in almost all areas south of the Huai and north of the Yangzi.

Map 9.1.
Jiangsu Province, 1935.

opportunities, residential patterns, cultural activities, and social status. Hierarchy, in other words, was structured largely according to native-place identification: the elite was composed primarily of people from Guangdong and Jiangnan, the unskilled service sector staffed mostly by migrants from Subei. So marked was the equation of local origin and economic status that Jiangnan culture became the symbol of urban sophistication and modernity, while the language, customs, and manners of people from Subei were associated with backwardness. Their inferior status was so generally accepted that the term "Subei folk" (Subei ren ) connoted to Shanghainese poverty, filth, and uncivilized manners.

In this paper I focus on the experience of Subei people in Shanghai to explore labor market segmentation and its relationship to social inequality. The first part of the paper examines the status of Subei people in the labor market; the second part, addressing a question overlooked by labor market segmentation theorists, analyzes the reasons that Subei people in particular were tracked into and trapped in an inferior status. The divisions in Shanghai's labor markets, we shall see, both reflected and created the prejudice against Subei people that has been so prominent throughout the twentieth century.

The Regional Nature of the Shanghai Labor Market

Subei people constituted one of the largest immigrant populations in Shanghai, by 1949 representing approximately one fifth of the city's 5 million residents.^[7] Whether they had migrated from Subei themselves or were the offspring of Subei migrants, whether they were poor peasants fleeing the prospect of starvation or wealthy landowners fleeing land reform in the 1940s, Subei people in Shanghai concentrated in jobs that Shanghainese regarded as inferior. Republican period surveys of the Shanghai work force reveal three general patterns: (1) unskilled, physically demanding occupations were dominated almost exclusively by people from Subei; (2) occupa-

[7] It is impossible to know the exact percentage of the Shanghai population that was composed of people from Subei for other points in time, since population statistics that indicate native place specify only the province, not the district or county. According to the only available statistic, there were 1.5 million people from Subei in Shanghai in 1949. The entire population of Shanghai at that time was 5,062,878. See Xie Junmei, "Shanghai lishishang renkou de bianqian," Shehui kexue 3 (1980): 112.

tions attracting people from Jiangnan as well as Subei were stratified, with Subei people performing the lowest-paying, lowest-status jobs; and (3) jobs requiring high levels of skill or education were rarely available to Subei people.

The description of the labor market that follows relies on qualitative as well as quantitative data. An analysis of labor market segmentation in Shanghai would ideally include wage data, comparing the earnings of workers in different occupations. Unfortunately, such data are largely unavailable. Most of the unskilled jobs performed by Subei people were never surveyed by officials, who were more concerned with the plight of factory workers. Even when data are available, they are often unreliable. For instance, wage data for rickshaw pullers ignore the amount they had to pay for renting the rickshaw; conversely, wage data for barbers ignore the room and board that came with the job. Wage rates for most occupations fail to account for the seasonal nature of employment. Finally, wage data for any given occupation obscure the multitude of grades of workers within that enterprise, each of which had a different salary. Therefore, in the discussion that follows, wage data are used only when they may be helpful in placing the earnings of Subei workers in perspective.^[8]

It was not in the ranks of the industrial proletariat but rather among coolie laborers that Subei people were most commonly found in Shanghai. Occupations most closely associated with Subei people were those that required little skill, were physically demanding, offered low pay, and promised only irregular employment. They were, in other words, precisely the kinds of job constituting the "secondary market" in the theory of dual labor markets.

Rickshaw pulling, more than any other occupation, was associated with and symbolized the status of Subei people in the Shanghai labor market. From the beginning of Shanghai's rapid development in the mid-nineteenth century, transport vehicles that depended on human labor power were considered the domain of Subei migrants. In the 1860s, well before the appearance of rickshaws, wheelbarrows used to transport both materials and people were called "Jiangbei carts," since Subei migrants were the majority of cart pullers.^[9] When rickshaws began to be used in 1875, Subei people immediately took over the work of hauling rickshaws. By 1913, when there were approximately 10,000 rickshaw pullers in Shanghai, an estimated 80–90 percent were from Subei.^[10] By the mid-1930s, when the number of rickshaw

[8] For a more thorough discussion of the problems of wage data in Shanghai, see Shanghai Bureau of Social Affairs, City Government of Shanghai, Wage Rates in Shanghai (Shanghai, 1935), pp. 33–62.

[9] Shanghaishi Chuzu Qiche Gongsi, "Shanghai jiedao he gonglu yingye keyun shiliao huiji" (Shanghai, 1982), p. 17.

[10] Huang Renjing, Huren baojian (Shanghai, 1913), p. 85.

pullers had soared to 80,000, 90 percent were of Subei origin.^[11] So extreme was the dominance of rickshaw pulling by people from Subei that one Republican period surveyor complained that the prevalence of Subei dialect among rickshaw pullers was an obstacle to his research work.^[12] Another reporter observed that only Subei people, plagued by natural disasters and economic destruction in their home villages, would condescend to do this "bestial" and "inhuman" work.^[13]

While rickshaw pulling may have been the job most immediately associated with Subei people, migrants from northern Jiangsu also dominated the ranks of freight haulers. The approximately 50,000 Shanghai dock workers in the 1930s were dominated by the so-called Subei bang . The predominance of Subei people among the loaders at the Shanghai docks was so extreme that, as in rickshaw pulling, the Subei dialect was the language of the trade.^[14] And like rickshaw pulling, dock work did not offer stable employment. Most employees worked on a temporary basis, usually 15 to 20 days a month.^[15] Most of the workers who hauled freight at the Shanghai train station were also from Subei.^[16]

The final category of jobs dominated by Subei people was in the service sector. The overwhelming majority of barbers, bathhouse attendants, cobblers, and night soil and garbage collectors were from Subei.^[17] Particularly the latter two jobs—quite literally "shit work"—were ones that only Subei people seemed willing to do, both confirming and reinforcing their lowly status. As one description of Shanghai Municipal Council employees notes, "Country people from Jiangbei, the Chinese who are most able to swallow hardship, are concentrated in the garbage department. Although there are individual Jiangbei people in other departments, the garbage department is

[11] Shanghaishi Shehuiju, "Shanghaishi renli chefu shenghuo zhuangkuang diaocha baogaoshu," Shehui banyuekan , Sept. 10, 1934, p. 103.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Shanghaishi Renlicheye Tongye Gonghui, Shanghai gongbuju gaige renliche jiufen zhenxiang (Shanghai, 1934), p. 3.

[14] Zhu Bangxing, Hu Lin'ge, and Xu Sheng, Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong (Hong Kong, 1939), p. 573. In addition to the Subei bang , there were also Hubei, Ningbo, and Guangdong bang at the docks. According to one study, workers from Subei did the heaviest jobs of transporting cargo on shoulder poles, while those from Guangdong worked aboard the boats, arranging cargo. Shanghai Gangshi Hua Bianxie zu, Shanghai gangshi hua (Shanghai, 1979), pp. 276–79.

[15] Shanghai Gangshi Hua Bianxie zu, Shanghai gangshi hua , p. 276.

[16] Li Cishan, "Shanghai laodong qingkuang," Xin qingnian 7 , no. 6 (May 1920): 60.

[17] On the dominance of Subei people among barbers, see Li Cishan, "Shanghai laodong qingkuang," pp. 48–49. See also Shen Bao , Apr. 26, 1915. For bathhouse workers, see Shanghaishi Renmin Zhengfu Gongshangju Jingji Jihuachu, ed., Shanghai siying gongshangye fenye gaikuang (Shanghai, 1951), p. 66; for cobblers, see Shen Bao , Apr. 26, 1915; for night soil collectors, see interview with Zhou Guozhen, Zhabei District Sanitation Bureau, Shanghai, Nov. 3, 1986; for garbage collectors, see Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye , p. 607.

really theirs."^[18] So demeaning was it to be a garbage collector that a man from Yancheng preferred the privation of unemployment. When, in order to survive, he finally had no choice but to become a garbage collector, he did not want anyone to know. "Garbage collectors employed by the city had to wear a red shirt," he recalled. "I hated wearing that red shirt because everyone could then see who I was and what I did. So as soon as we finished work each day, I would take off that shirt."^[19]

The occupations dominated by Subei people were characterized by a further regional hierarchy. The most important division was between people from Yangzhou and those from the more northern areas of Yancheng and Funing. In general, people from Yangzhou had the jobs requiring slightly more skill and offering better working conditions than those employing people from farther north, reflecting perhaps the prosperity of Yangzhou compared with Yancheng. While some Yangzhou people could be found in all the occupations discussed above, they were particularly known for dominating the "three knives" occupations as barbers, bathhouse pedicurists, and cooks.^[20] Yangzhou was famous as an exporter of barbers, particularly to Shanghai, and the head of the barbers' guild in 1920, Chen Sihai, was a Yangzhou native.^[21] As one man who had come from a village near Yangzhou in the 1930s to work as a barber in Shanghai recalled, "My father was a barber in Shanghai; I was a barber, and my brother was a barber. In our village, at least ten out of every twenty families had members who were barbers in Shanghai!"^[22] People from Yancheng and Funing, in contrast, could claim dominance of the rickshaw-pulling profession. A survey of the native place of rickshaw pullers in 1934–35 showed some 53 percent coming from Yancheng and Funing, while only 17 percent hailed from the area near Yangzhou.^[23]

The hierarchy of jobs dominated by Yangzhou and by Yancheng and Funing people was confirmed by attitudes of pride and resentment expressed by people from each of those areas. People from Yancheng knew they could

[18] Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye , p. 607.

[19] Interview with the author at the Jing'an District Sanitation Bureau, Shanghai, Nov. 18, 1986.

[20] Wu Liangrong, "Shanghaishi Subeiji jumin shehui biandong fenxi," in Shanghai shehuixue xuehui, ed., Shehuixue wenji (Shanghai, 1984), p. 177.

[21] Li Cishan, "Shanghai laodong qingkuang," pp. 48–49.

[22] Interview with He Zhenghua, Xinxin Beauty Salon, Shanghai, Nov. 12, 1986. There were also a number of barbers in Shanghai from Zhenjiang, but the Yangzhou bang was clearly the dominant one. See Li Cishan, "Shanghai laodong qingkuang," pp. 48–49; see also Shen Bao , Apr. 26, 1915.

[23] Shanghaishi Chuzu Qiche Gongsi, "Shanghai jiedao," pp. 127–29. This survey was of 3,517 rickshaw pullers. The predominance of people from Yancheng and Funing among rickshaw pullers is confirmed by another 1934 survey. See Shanghaishi Shehuiju, "Shanghaishi renli," pp. 104–5.

not aspire to enter the occupations controlled by the Yangzhou bang . "The jobs done by people from Yangzhou were much better than ours," a man from Jianhu (near Yancheng) observed bitterly. "Their work was easier and lighter. Being a barber was much better than pulling a rickshaw! The worst work was hauling night soil carts, collecting garbage, and sweeping the streets. Not many Yangzhou people did those kinds of job. They were mostly in barber shops and bathhouses."^[24]

The envy Yancheng people felt for Yangzhou natives was matched by pride among the Yangzhounese. So strong was their sense of job superiority that people from Yangzhou sometimes expressed precisely the same attitudes of scorn and disgust toward Yancheng people that Jiangnan natives more frequently expressed toward Subei people as a group. Their sense of superiority was occasionally so extreme that they insisted Yangzhou was not part of Subei. For example, in explaining why the bathhouse bosses hired only people from Yangzhou, one man, himself a pedicurist from Yangzhou, said:

It was because we people from Yangzhou know how to speak well; we speak in a rather cultivated way. It was important for the service people to speak well, or the customers would not come. Our speech is very careful and soft, while theirs [people from Yancheng] is very crude—wawawawawawa . We were much more picky, while Subei people were very coarse; we were very sophisticated, while they were very poor.

Even though we were from Yangzhou, people still used to call us "Jiangbei folk." It was derogatory and it upset us. We knew we were from Yangzhou and were not really Jiangbei folk, but they did not know the difference.^[25]

Even he admitted, however, that despite the skill required to be a barber or pedicurist, both occupations were regarded as low-class by the more elite groups in Shanghai. Moreover, although the Yangzhou natives who worked in the service trades may well have represented the elite of Subei workers, their earnings were substantially less than even those Jiangnan natives who worked in the service sector. For example, tailors, most of whom came from the Jiangnan areas of Ningbo and Changzhou, earned 3–7 yuan (dollars) a day in 1920, while barbers could only count on making 2–3 jiao (dimes).^[26]

In addition to the occupations described above—ones completely dominated by Subei natives—a number of enterprises employed workers from both Jiangnan and Subei. Almost all such enterprises had a hierarchy of jobs in which Jiangnan natives were at the top and Subei people at the bottom. The most important such case, in terms of the number of Subei people employed, was factory work. As noted above, the majority of Subei migrants worked outside the ranks of the industrial proletariat. For them, factory employment

[24] Interview with Zhou Guozhen.

[25] Interview with Xu Liansheng, Yudechi Bathhouse, Shanghai, Nov. 12, 1986.

[26] Li Cishan, "Shanghai laodong qingkuang," pp. 48–49.

was the highest-status work to which they could aspire. Recalled a man from Yancheng, who worked as a garbage collector, "We really wanted to work in a factory, and I was very envious of my relatives who had factory jobs. But we just couldn't get in."^[27] Another man who worked for the city's sanitation bureau insisted with absolute certainty that "no people who were themselves born in Subei could get jobs in cotton mills. The only Subei people who were able to work in cotton mills were people who had been born and raised in Shanghai."^[28] In fact, a sizable number of women actually born and raised in Subei worked in Shanghai's cotton mills.^[29] His distorted impression shows that, for Subei people, securing a factory job was considered a step up.

The elite of Shanghai's industrial working class—those who performed highly skilled jobs, became technicians, and were employed at the highest wage rates—were primarily from Guangdong and Jiangnan. The scarce information available about the native-place origins of factory workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggests that Subei people were quite possibly latecomers to factory work in Shanghai.^[30] The earliest groups of factory workers were from Canton, Ningbo, and Shanghai proper. For example, when the first machine-building factories were established in the 1850s, skilled workers were recruited from Canton, where a foreign-owned shipbuilding factory already operated. Peasants from Ningbo and Shanghai were employed to perform the unskilled jobs. No mention was made of any workers from Subei.^[31]

When, in the early 1920s, Subei people began to appear in records of factory workers, they concentrated in industries that generally required the least skill and offered the lowest pay, such as silk reeling and cotton spinning. For example, while workers in the machinery industry earned an average of $0.85 a day in 1934, and those in shipbuilding earned $1.24, workers in silk filatures earned only $0.31, and in cotton spinning only $0.47. This gap partly reflects the difference in the earnings of male and female workers, for

[27] Interview with the author at the Jing'an District Sanitation Bureau, Shanghai, Nov. 18, 1986.

[28] Interview with Zhou Guozhen.

[29] Emily Honig, Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919–1949 (Stanford, 1986), pp. 59–62.

[30] The possibility that Subei people were latecomers to factory work, suggested by the scarce factory records that are available, is reinforced by the description of Subei people in a Japanese study written in 1909. The author observed a "class" comprising Subei people who worked as cobblers, coolies, cart and rickshaw pullers, night soil and garbage collectors, and peddlers. No mention was made of Subei people as factory workers at that time. This does not imply that no Subei people worked in factories but rather that their number was relatively small. See Toa Dobunkai, Shina keizai zensho (Osaka, 1908), 1:388–89.

[31] Zhongguo Shehui Kexueyuan Jingji Yanjiusuo, ed., Shanghai minzu jiqi gongye (Beijing, 1966), 1:50–51, 58, 68. See also Yuen Sang Leung, "Regional Rivalry in Mid-Nineteenth Century Shanghai: Cantonese vs. Ningpo Men," Ch'ing-shih wen-t'i 4, no. 8 (Dec. 1982): pp. 39–40.

the machinery and shipbuilding industries were dominated by men, while textiles primarily employed women. Yet even within the female-dominated textile industries, those dominated by Subei natives—cotton spinning and silk reeling—offered substantially less pay than industries where the majority of workers came from Jiangnan. In underwear-knitting factories, workers earned an average of $0.79 a day in 1934; in silk-weaving factories, $0.90; in cotton-weaving factories, $0.61; and in tobacco factories, $0.57^[32] —more than they earned in either cotton-spinning or silk-reeling factories.

Even within cotton mills and silk filatures, the higher-paying, skilled jobs went to people from Jiangnan. In the cotton-spinning industry—one of the largest employers of Subei workers—Subei women, considered strong, robust, and accustomed to dirt, were channeled into the workshops where the work was most arduous and dirty. Initially they dominated the undesirable jobs in the reeling workshops; in the 1930s, when mill managers began to hire women instead of men in the roving workshops, they recruited Subei women for the jobs.^[33] "This was because natives of Shanghai were not willing to do that work," a mill manager explained. "The wages were not necessarily the lowest, but the work was rough. In roving there was more dust and the air was not very good. Since the work was hard, Subei people were more able to do it."^[34] Women from Jiangnan villages concentrated in the weaving department, where the jobs generally required more skill and paid better: in 1934, women weavers earned an average of $0.64 a day, while women spinners earned $0.46; women rovers $0.53; and women reelers $0.43.^[35] Furthermore, a number of Jiangnan women who worked in the mills eventually became factory supervisors, secretaries, or bookkeepers, advancements unimaginable to women from Subei.^[36]

A similar division of labor between workers from Jiangnan and Subei was apparent in the silk-reeling industry. (The separate, and more prestigious, silk-weaving industry was dominated by workers from Zhejiang, Changzhou, and Suzhou.)^[37] When the head of the YWCA Labor Bureau, Cora Deng, visited a Shanghai silk filature in the late 1920s, she was especially struck

[32] Bureau of Social Affairs, Wage Rates in Shanghai (Shanghai, 1935), pp. 80–81. These wage statistics serve only as a rough index of the differences in earnings of workers in Jiangnan-dominated versus Subei-dominated industries. As averages, they represent workers in all workshops of particular industries, women, men, and children, those employed on both time and piece rates. They do not take into account the seasonal nature of some industries.

[33] The division of labor according to native place in the cotton industry is discussed more extensively in Honig, Sisters and Strangers , pp. 72–74.

[34] Interview with He Zhiguang, Putuo District Federation of Commerce and Industry, Shanghai, June 26, 1980.

[35] Bureau of Social Affairs, Wage Rates , pp. 102–3; 108–9. This represents the wage for women in the weaving department of cotton mills, whereas the $0.61 listed earlier is for women in separate weaving mills.

[36] Honig, Sisters and Strangers , p. 73.

[37] Zhu Bangxing et al., Shanghai chanye , p. 125.

by the concentration of Subei women in the worst jobs, which often involved the painful work of bobbing silk cocoons in boiling water. Women from Jiangnan, on the other hand—having personal connections to the factory management—were hired to work under much better conditions.^[38] Likewise, in the tobacco industry, where most of the workers were from Zhejiang, the minority of Subei workers were hired only to perform the unskilled tasks. Employed on a temporary basis, they were reportedly "maltreated and abused practically all the time, sometimes even being punched and kicked."^[39] In the flour industry, dominated by workers from Ningbo, Wuxi, and Changzhou, those from Subei worked primarily as coolies, loading the heavy sacks of flour to be transported for sale.^[40]

Even among prostitutes, the division between women from Jiangnan and Subei (and the further division between Yangzhou and the northern parts of Subei) was obvious to observers. The highest-class prostitutes (changsan ), who lived in lavishly furnished brothels, acquired skills as entertainers, and catered only to wealthy businessmen and officials, came from Jiangnan. The second-class prostitutes (yao'er ) were primarily from Yangzhou. Women (and more commonly girls) from Subei, many of whom had been kidnapped from their home villages, were the overwhelming majority of "wild chickens" (ye ji ), who wandered the streets of Shanghai's red-light district soliciting customers.^[41]

The dominance of Subei people in unskilled, low-paying jobs may obscure an equally important aspect of the work experience of Subei people in Shanghai: many never entered the formal labor market at all or worked outside it for long periods of time. Large numbers of Subei migrants eked out a living by peddling food, collecting and selling paper, hulling rice, making and selling charcoal briquettes, or doing other people's laundry. The garbage collector Zhou Guozhen spent several years supporting himself by peddling vegetables before securing a regular job in the city's sanitation bureau.^[42] One man who eventually worked as a rickshaw puller survived by picking and selling garbage when he first came to Shanghai in 1925; another made shoes and repaired umbrellas; a woman helped support her family by making charcoal briquettes and by selling vegetables and occasionally fish.^[43] Chen Dewang, selected as a model worker in the 1950s, recalled that upon arriving in Shanghai from Hai'an in 1944, he first lived with a group of rickshaw pullers in

[38] Yuzhi Deng, "A Visit to a Silk Filature in Shanghai," Green Year Supplement (Nov. 1928): 9–10.

[39] Shanghai Shehui Kexueyuan Jingji Yanjiusuo, Nanyang Xiongdi Yancao Gongsi shiliao (Shanghai, 1958), p. 74.

[40] Shanghai Shehui Kexueyuan Jingji Yanjiusuo, Rongjia qiye shiliao (Shanghai, 1980), 1:134.

[41] Honig, Sisters and Strangers , p. 71. See also Huang Renjing, Huren baojian , p. 127.

[42] Interview with Zhou Guozhen.

[43] Interview with retired workers at the Zhongxing Street Residence Committee, Zhabei District, Shanghai, Nov. 4, 1986.

the Nanshi District—all men from Subei who had come to Shanghai alone. "I couldn't pull a rickshaw then because I was too small. People felt sorry for me because I had no parents, so they let me wash their clothes, clean vegetables, and help them cook." When he was finally tall enough to pull a rickshaw, he still could not afford the rent, so he spent several years pulling other people's rickshaws when they were between shifts. Only after several years was Chen able to borrow enough money to rent a rickshaw with three other men and begin to work regular shifts.^[44] Some women from Subei gleaned some cash by working as "poor people's seamstresses" (feng qiong po ), sewing and mending clothes for factory workers and apprentices whose wives remained in the countryside.^[45] Many people from Subei, in other words, worked for long periods of time outside or on the fringes of the formal labor market, some never securing regular jobs at all. For them, regular employment as a rickshaw puller or garbage collector was a step up.

To the extent that Subei people performed casual labor and concentrated in unskilled, low-paying jobs, the Shanghai labor market was a divided one. The labor markets that employed people from Jiangnan were almost completely inaccessible to Subei migrants. Broadly understood, then, labor market segmentation theory contributes to a description and analysis of the status of Subei people in Shanghai, where hierarchical divisions were based on native place rather than race or nationality. It explains how the Shanghai labor market reinforced and perpetuated inequalities between Subei and Jiangnan natives, as the American labor market has done between blacks and whites.

The question that remains, however, concerns the creation of those inequalities. Labor market segmentation theorists, writing about the United States, assume the relative status of various social groups—that white people, for example, are of a higher status than black people and are therefore more likely to be found in one of the primary sectors of the labor market. Focusing more on how the labor markets actually operate, the theorists do not offer an explanation of why certain groups are located in particular sectors. Yet the relative status of Jiangnan and Subei natives cannot be taken for granted. Understanding the status of Subei people in Shanghai requires an examination of why they, in particular, dominated the ranks of laborers in unskilled, low-paying, physically demanding jobs.

The Origins of Native-Place Hierarchy

An explanation of the concentration of Subei people in the unskilled sector of the Shanghai labor market must begin with an examination of the region

[44] Interview with Chen Dewang, Shanghai Taxicab Company, Oct. 30, 1986.

[45] Tu Shipin, Shanghai chunqiu (Hong Kong, 1968), part 3, p. 90.

from which they emigrated and the circumstances under which they arrived in Shanghai seeking work. Conventional wisdom holds that Subei was traditionally a poverty-stricken, disaster-ridden region—representing the polar opposite of the economically advanced and prosperous Jiangnan. While poverty was the background to most migration that began in the early nineteenth century, Subei had not always been the economically inferior part of Jiangsu Province. Its prosperity, in fact, had previously rivaled that of Jiangnan. "The Grand Canal and the Huanghe [Yellow] River along with the waterways branching out from them," observes the anthropologist Hsiao Tung Fei (Fei Xiaotong), "once formed a web of canals resembling those seen south of the Changjiang [Yangzi] today."^[46] The city of Huaiyin, along the Grand Canal, had been the center for the tributary grain transport administration during the Qing.^[47] Yangzhou, a transshipment point on the Grand Canal, had been one of the most prosperous and famed cultural centers of China since the Tang. It "was the jewel of China in the eighth century," according to E. H. Schafer,

a bustling, bourgeois city where money flowed easily . . . a gay city, a city of well-dressed people, a city where the best entertainment was always available, a city of parks and gardens, a very Venice, traversed by waterways, where the boats outnumbered the carriages. It was a city of moonlight and lanterns, a city of song and dance, a city of courtesans.^[48]

Through the mid-Qing, Yangzhou remained a city whose wealth and prestige attracted merchants, artists, scholars, tourists, and even the Qianlong emperor himself on six occasions. Described as the "epitomy of Southern culture" and "the nerve center of domestic trade," it boasted teahouses, restaurants, literary salons, and some of the most famed artistic talents in China.^[49]

Only in the nineteenth century did Subei decline in prosperity and prestige. Its impoverishment can be attributed to two interrelated events. First, the Grand Canal was replaced by sea transport, particularly for the shipment of grain from southern to northern China. Coastal ships, first used in the 1820s when Yellow River silting severely impeded the passage of boats through the canal, became the major means of transporting tribute grain

[46] Hsiao Tung Fei, "Small Towns in Northern Jiangsu," in Hsiao Tung Fei et al., Small Towns in China (Beijing, 1986), p. 91.

[47] Harold Hinton, "The Grain Tribute System of the Ch'ing Dynasty," Far Eastern Quarterly 11, no. 3 (May 1952): 345.

[48] E. H. Schafer, quoted in Antonia Finnane, "Prosperity and Decline under the Qing: Yangzhou and Its Hinterland, 1644–1810" (Ph.D. diss., Australian National University, 1985), p. 34.

[49] Ping-ti Ho, "The Salt Merchants of Yang-chou: A Study of Commercial Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century China," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 17 (June 1954): 156–58. See also Finnane, "Prosperity and Decline," pp. 2, 279–304.

beginning in the 1840s.^[50] This meant that certain cities and towns in Subei lost their importance as transportation and commercial centers. Mid-nineteenth-century Yangzhou, for example, was described as a "skeleton" of its former self.^[51] Decline of the Grand Canal also meant that the government paid less attention to maintaining and repairing the dikes on waterways connecting with the canal, thereby leaving parts of Subei vulnerable to unprecedented numbers of floods and natural disasters.^[52] Second, in 1853 the Yellow River shifted course: rather than flowing into Hongze Lake and then across Subei to the sea, it now ran northeast from Kaifeng, then crossed Shandong. The Huai River subsequently emptied into Hongze Lake with no further outlet, thereby becoming a source of treacherous flooding in Subei.^[53] From the mid-nineteenth century on, then, cycles of floods, famine, and poverty characterized large portions of Subei.

The impoverishment and decline of Subei was made all the more conspicuous by the simultaneously rapid economic development of Jiangnan. By the early twentieth century, Jiangnan was as famous for its wealth as Subei was for its poverty. These differences between the two parts of the province were more than impressionistic. Modern industry as it developed in Jiangsu was centered almost entirely in the cities of Jiangnan. In 1931, for example, some 95 percent of Jiangsu's 403,152 industrial workers were employed in Shanghai and cities of Jiangnan, such as Wuxi or Changzhou. In Subei, only the city of Nantong could boast a significant number of factory workers; cities farther north, such as Yangzhou, Yancheng, and Funing, had fewer than 100 workers each.^[54] Whereas industry was a growing part of the Jiangnan economy, Subei continued to depend on agricultural production—it was a major producer of cotton, salt, and pigs (thereby giving rise to the derogatory expression "Jiangbei swine" in Shanghai dialect).^[55] Even when it came to agricultural production, Subei could not compete with Jiangnan, as reflected in the relative values of land in the two parts of the province. In the mid-1930s, while paddy land in Jiangnan counties such as Wuxi or Changshou sold for an average of 100 to 140 yuan per mu , they cost only 30 to 50 yuan per mu in Subei; a mu of dry land that cost anywhere from 55 to 120 yuan in Jiangnan was worth only 20 to 40 yuan in Subei.^[56] Compared to Jiangnan,

[50] Susan Mann Jones and Philip Kuhn, "Dynastic Decline and the Roots of Rebellion," in John Fairbank, ed., The Cambridge History of China , vol. 10 (Cambridge, 1978), p. 119.

[51] Finnane, "Prosperity and Decline," pp. 4–5.

[52] Charles Davis Jameson, "River Systems of the Provinces of Anhui and Kiangsu North of the Yangtzekiang," Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal 43, no. 1 (Jan. 1912): 69–75.

[53] David Faure, "Local Political Disturbances in Kiangsu Province, China, 1870–1911" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1976), p. 37.

[54] Li Pingheng, Zhongguo laodong nianjian (Beijing, 1932), pp. 2–3.

[55] Bureau of Foreign Trade, Ministry of Industry, China Industrial Handbooks: Kiangsu (Shanghai, 1933).

[56] Zhao Ruheng, Jiangsusheng jian (Shanghai, 1935), chap. 8, pp. 17–22.

one of the wealthiest agricultural and commercial regions in all of China, Subei was indeed poor and undeveloped.

The relative wealth and poverty of the two parts of Jiangsu was reflected in patterns of migration: from the time of Subei's decline in the nineteenth century, we find records of "Jiangbei refugees" heading south to Jiangnan. Subei, it seemed, was a notorious producer of refugees. Having fled their homes because of natural disasters, or sometimes simply because it was the winter slack season, peasants congregated in Jiangsu's cities and towns, hoping to take advantage of the relief services—food, clothing, and medical care—that were often provided. Towns within Subei were the first destination for many. In 1876, for example, some 60,000–70,000 refugees were reported in Huaiyin and 42,000 in Yangzhou; in 1898, 100,000 camped in Huaiyin (arriving allegedly at the rate of 2,000 per day) and 40,000 in Yangzhou.^[57] Others headed directly for Jiangnan cities, such as Suzhou, Changzhou, or Shanghai. At least as early as 1907, the Jiangbei Famine Relief Committee was established in Shanghai to attend to the problem of Subei refugees.^[58]

Whether in cities of Subei or Jiangnan, Subei refugees were considered a source of disorder. As early as 1814, officials from Jiangsu and Zhejiang complained to the emperor about disruption caused by the "Jiangbei vagabonds" in such areas as Hangzhou, Jiaxing, Huzhou, Suzhou, and Changzhou. "Every year during the autumn and winter slack season," stated the edict,

there are vagabonds from the Jiangbei places of Huaiyin, Xuzhou, and Haizhou. Usually several hundred band together as a group. They come by boat or on foot, [sometimes] pushing small carts. They are dressed in every which way and almost look like beggars. They call themselves famine victims. Whenever they pass through a village, they sit there and beg for free meals, a place to stay, or money. You must give them whatever they want so that they will leave. Otherwise they will rob you, since they have a lot of people. Everyone is afraid of their toughness; no one dares argue with them. . . . Some wealthy shopkeepers have moved to avoid trouble. . . .

Recently there have been more and more of these [Jiangbei people]. When they come south, they are joined by all the other unreliable elements—bandits, hoodlums, etc. I am afraid that if we let this situation continue, a major incident will occur.^[59]

In his study of Jiangsu, the historian David Faure observes that throughout the second half of the nineteenth century there were constant reports of incidents—from petty thieving to conflicts provoked by "famine-begging"—involving "Jiangbei vagabonds." Officials in some Subei cities were so deter-

[57] Faure, "Local Political Disturbances," 163.

[58] North-China Herald , Feb. 22, 1907.

[59] Daqing shichao shengxun (Taibei, n.d.), Jiaqing, p. 1820. The edict is dated July 9, 1814. I am grateful to Harold Kahn for calling my attention to this document.

mined to dispose of these undesirables that they actually paid for their transport to Jiangnan, where they were presumably headed anyway. And officials in Jiangnan cities, partly resigned to the seasonal influx of the refugees, waited for winter's end and then provided the refugees a "travel fee" so they would return to Subei.^[60]

Not all migration was temporary or seasonal. Large numbers of people from Subei went to Jiangnan with the hope of settling there permanently. Some continued to farm, certain that even the worst circumstances in Jiangnan were better than their circumstances would be in Subei. Hsiao Tung Fei recalled often having seen, as a child, migrants from Subei cultivating the newly reclaimed land surrounding Lake Tai. Vulnerable to flooding whenever the lake water rose, this land was undesirable to natives of the area.^[61] Yuji Muramatsu, in his study of landlordism in Jiangnan, corroborates this portrait of Subei immigrants forming an "underclass" among the Jiangnan peasants: they were "willing to be content with rather poor conditions to get a start in life as tenant farmers."^[62] In addition to those who worked as farmers, a large number of Subei migrants settled in Jiangnan cities, living either on the boats they had brought from Subei or in shacks made of reed mats and whatever scrap materials they could find. By the 1870s the shack settlements of Subei refugees had already attracted the concern of officials in Shanghai.^[63]

Although by Jiangnan standards the conditions under which Subei migrants lived and labored may have appeared intolerable, for many people from Subei these conditions were a vast improvement over what they had left behind. A man who left Yancheng in the early 1940s to work on the Wuxi docks explained that "life in Wuxi was completely different from life in Subei. My own opinion is that life in Subei was very tough. We ate turnips and sweet potatoes. Actually sweet potatoes were considered really good food in Subei. But when I came to Jiangnan, I ate rice. Rice was one of the best things about Jiangnan!" When asked whether having to work as a coolie lessened the desirability of Wuxi, he emphatically replied, "Of course Wuxi was still better—I was eating rice there!" Even when he moved to Shanghai, where he worked as a night soil collector and lived in one of the shack settlements, he remained certain that he was better off than in Subei. "At least we could earn some money in the shack settlements," he explained. "In the countryside we couldn't earn a cent."^[64]

[60] Faure, "Local Political Disturbances," pp. 279–80.

[61] Hsiao Tung Fei, "Small Towns," p. 107.

[62] Yuji Muramatsu, "A Documentary Study of Chinese Landlordism in the Late Ch'ing and Early Republican Kiangnan," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 24, no. 3 (1966): 581.

[63] Shen Bao , Sept. 24, 1872.

[64] Interview with Zhang Ronghua, Zhabei District Sanitation Bureau, Shanghai, Nov. 3, 1986.

The picture that emerges, then, is that throughout Jiangnan, Subei refugees—whether they migrated seasonally or moved south permanently—accepted a much lower standard of living, and hence poorer working conditions, than Jiangnan natives. This at least partly explains the concentration of Subei people in the unskilled sector of the Shanghai labor market. They were, as conventional wisdom holds, fleeing poverty and willing to do jobs that no one else would do, much like the Irish who fled famine and migrated to the United States in the early nineteenth century. Furthermore, the migration experience of Subei people to Jiangnan suggests that the stereotype of them as willing to do the lowliest jobs may even have preceded Shanghai's modern development; people from Jiangnan who moved to Shanghai most likely brought with them an impression of Subei people as poor, menial laborers, for that is what they had observed in the countryside.

This alone, however, does not fully account for the concentration of Subei people in the unskilled sector of the Shanghai labor market nor for their domination of that sector. Subei was not the sole source of the poverty-stricken peasants who migrated to Shanghai. What of those who came from the Jiangnan districts of Wuxi, Changzhou, Ningbo, or Shaoxing? Despite the relative prosperity of these regions, they too were the source of many poor peasants who came to Shanghai hungry for both food and work. Why, then, do we find such little evidence of them among the ranks of Shanghai's unskilled and coolie laborers?

Scholars attempting to explain the experiences of different immigrant groups in American history have proposed a connection between the types of job experience immigrants might have acquired in their home countries and their employment patterns in the United States. A study of German and Irish immigrants in nineteenth-century Philadelphia, for instance, suggests that the Irish, coming from an underdeveloped rural economy, arrived in the United States with no industrial experience and therefore were concentrated in the unskilled sector of the labor market. The Germans, in contrast, came from an industrializing country and were able to use their previously acquired skills to obtain better jobs in Philadelphia.^[65]

At least one scholar has suggested a similar connection between rural handicraft industries and the kinds of job held by people of different local origins in Shanghai.^[66] At first glance this seems a compelling explanation. Jiangnan people hailed from a region famous for highly developed handicraft industries, while Subei was equally notorious for its lack of handicrafts. That men from Wuxi, known for its production of tin, dominated the tin-smithing

[65] Bruce Laurie, Theodore Hershberg, and George Alter, "Immigrants and Industry: The Philadelphia Experience, 1850–1880," in Richard L. Ehrlich, ed., Immigrants in Industrial America, 1850–1920 (Charlottesville, Va., 1977), pp. 123–50.

[66] Wu Liangrong, "Shanghaishi Subeiji jumin shehui biandong fenxi," in Shanghai Shehuixue Xuehui, ed., Shehuixue wenji (Shanghai, 1984), p. 177.

jobs in Shanghai is hardly surprising. Nor should it be surprising that women from Wuxi and Changzhou, areas known for the production of handwoven cloth, dominated the weaving jobs in Shanghai's textile mills. Upon closer scrutiny, though, this explanation is problematic. First, Subei was not completely lacking in handicrafts, although their development may have been retarded compared to Jiangnan. For example, the Subei counties of Taixing and Taixian were known for the production of handwoven cloth.^[67] Why, then, do we not find more women from these areas in the weaving departments of the mills? Second, there appears to have been little connection between the handicraft traditions of a region and the specific skills brought to Shanghai by peasants migrating from that area. Few women from Wuxi who were employed as weavers in the Shanghai mills had themselves engaged in cloth weaving before leaving the countryside.^[68] While Yangzhou's history as a consumption center might seem to explain the predominance of Yangzhou men employed in the Shanghai barbershops and bathhouses, few had themselves ever worked as barbers or bathhouse attendants before coming to Shanghai. Rather, the majority had been peasants.^[69]

An explanation of the correlation between local origins and labor market segmentation must consider how Shanghai's labor markets operated—how labor was recruited and how individuals sought employment. Previous studies have already documented the crucial role of personal and native-place connections in obtaining jobs, even in Shanghai's most modern enterprises.^[70] People in management or supervisory positions tended to hire relatives, friends, or people from their home district. The important question, then, becomes the kind of connections available to migrants from Subei compared to those from Jiangnan.

An examination of the local origins of Shanghai's business community—including the owners, directors, and managers of enterprises ranging from factories to banks—indicates that people from Subei indeed had limited personal or native-place connections on which to draw in seeking jobs. Of the 2,082 individuals from Jiangsu and Zhejiang (representing nearly 90 percent of the total) listed in a commercial directory published in the 1940s, only 175 (8 percent) were from Subei. Of those from Subei, the majority were from the southernmost areas of Nantong, Haimen, and Rugao, leaving only 88 (4 percent of the total) from Yangzhou north to Funing. A closer look at the individuals from Subei listed in the directory reveals that most were involved in rickshaw companies, barbershops, bathhouses, and construction; none was

[67] Cao Hui, "Jiangbei funü shenghuo gaikuang," Nüsheng 2, no. 10 (Feb. 1934): 10–11.

[68] This observation is based on interviews I conducted with retired women cotton mill workers in Shanghai during 1979–81, as well as a survey of retirement cards at the Shanghai Number Two Textile Mill indicating each worker's personal history.

[69] Interviews with He Zhenghua and Xu Liansheng.

[70] See Honig, Sisters and Strangers , pp. 79–93.

involved in industry or banking.^[71] Little wonder, then, that Subei migrants concentrated in these enterprises. Furthermore, this distribution of the Shanghai business elite explains why peasants from Wuxi, who might have at least occasionally been as poverty-stricken as those from Subei, did not end up in the unskilled sector of the Shanghai labor market. They had connections elsewhere. As a woman factory worker from Yuyao observed, "Those of us from Zhejiang could sometimes get jobs in banks because there were a lot of Zhejiang bankers. But if you were from Subei, you could never get a job in a bank."^[72] (This may also help explain why poor peasants from Jiangnan areas were not the objects of social prejudice: they came from the districts that were associated with the Shanghai elite.)

We can at this point only speculate as to why merchants from Subei failed to join the ranks of the Shanghai business elite. Possibly they lacked sufficient capital to invest in Shanghai as extensively as merchants from Jiangnan did, and used what little they had to invest in enterprises, such as rickshaw companies and bathhouses, that did not require large amounts of capital. One must wonder, however, why the prosperous salt merchants of Yangzhou did not use their funds to stake a claim in the profits to be made from Shanghai's development. Perhaps, as the historian Ping-ti Ho suggests, conspicuous consumption and patronage of the arts left them with little capital for potential investments.^[73] Yet another possibility is simply that individuals from Jiangnan, pushed partly by the Taiping occupation, arrived in Shanghai first and established control over the more lucrative enterprises. If there was competition over Shanghai's wealth during its early development, it was between people from Canton and Ningbo. People from Subei do not even appear to have been in the running.^[74] A full explanation requires research that is beyond the scope of this paper. Nonetheless, it is clear that Shanghai's economic elite was divided according to local origin, with Jiangnan people in positions far superior to those that people from Subei attained. Subsequent migrants concentrated in the areas where they had connections; Subei people worked in precisely the enterprises that were owned or managed by individuals with whom they could claim "hometown connections" (tongxiang guanxi ).

In addition to connections with individuals based on native-place ties, two kinds of institution played a significant role in securing jobs: the Green Gang and native-place associations. From the early twentieth century, Green Gang leaders carved out spheres of influence in Shanghai, subgroups of the gang sometimes controlling entire enterprises.^[75] Connections with gang leaders,

[71] Shanghaishi Shanghui, ed., Shanghaishi geye tongye gonghui lijianshi minglu (Shanghai, n.d.).

[72] Interview with Shi Xiaomei, First Shanghai Textile Mill, Mar. 11, 1980.

[73] Ping-ti Ho, "Salt Merchants," pp. 166–67.

[74] Leung, "Regional Rivalry," pp. 29–30.

[75] Xue Gengxin, "Jindai Shanghaide liumang," Shanghai wenshi ziliao 3 (1980): 160–78.

which often intersected native-place connections, thus assumed importance in the search for jobs. The fragmentary information currently available about the Green Gang suggests that here too the resources of Subei migrants were not as plentiful as those of their Jiangnan counterparts. Even though Subei itself was often described as a center of Green Gang activity, none of the three major Green Gang leaders in Shanghai was from Subei.^[76] Du Yuesheng was a native of Pudong (part of Shanghai); Huang Jinrong hailed from Suzhou; Zhang Xiaolin came from Hangzhou. A Jiangbei bang existed within the Green Gang, led by Gu Zhuxuan and Jin Jiulin. Neither was ever as influential as the former three, who had "pupils" in almost every enterprise in Shanghai. Gu Zhuxuan, called the "Subei Emperor" by Subei people in Shanghai, was powerful in the rickshaw business, where thousands of workers recognized him as their master.^[77] In other words, migrants from Jiangnan had a network of people from their hometowns whose position in the gang provided them access to a wide range of jobs; the gang connections available to Subei people, though, offered more limited opportunities and may indeed have contributed to the tracking of Subei migrants into jobs such as rickshaw pulling.

In addition to the Green Gang, Jiangnan migrants could draw on the influence and services provided by native-place associations. The Ningbo Guild, which existed from the 1860s, actively helped nonelite people from Ningbo find jobs in Shanghai. In the early stages of Shanghai's development, the guild recruited workers and apprentices from Ningbo for employment in Shanghai's foreign shipyards.^[78] Previous scholars have assumed that no native-place associations from Subei existed in Shanghai.^[79] If this was the case, Subei migrants clearly lacked a resource that benefited people from Jiangnan areas. Preliminary research suggests, however, that several Subei districts had native-place associations. In the 1910s an association of Yangzhou sojourners existed in Shanghai, and by the 1930s and 1940s most Subei districts had associations in Shanghai.^[80] Unfortunately little is known about

[76] Feng Hefa, ed., Zhongguo nongcun jingji ziliao (Shanghai, 1933), 1:359–60.

[77] Interview with Gu Shuping, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, Nov. 19, 1986.

[78] Leung, "Regional Rivalry," p. 40. Also see Susan Mann Jones, "The Ningpo Pang and Financial Power at Shanghai," in Mark Elvin and G. W. Skinner, eds., The Chinese City between Two Worlds (Stanford, 1974), pp. 73–96.

[79] The only study that deals extensively with guilds and native-place associations in Shanghai is Negishi Tadashi, Chugoku no girudo (Tokyo, 1953). Also see Negishi, Shanhai no girudo (Tokyo, 1951). Neither study makes reference to Subei associations in Shanghai.

[80] The association was the Yangzhou Bashou Gongsuo and was reported in Shen Bao , Jan. 4, 1917. A Yangzhou Bayi Lühu Tongxianghui was reported in Shen Bao , Sept. 2, 1931; a Dongtai Lühu Tongxianghui in Shen Bao , Sept. 8, 1931; a Xinghua Tongxianghui in Shen Bao , Sept. 10, 1931; a Huai'an Liuyi Huiguan is mentioned in Shanghaishi Shanghui, ed., Shanghaishi geye , pp. 17, 94. In addition, there were several associations that represented larger parts of Subei. For example, a Jianghuai Lühu Tongxianghui existed at least from the mid-1920s. See Shen Bao , July 7, 1925. There was also a Subei Lühu Tongxianghui, although nothing is known about its origins or development. It is mentioned in Gu Shuping, "Wo liyong Gu Zhuxuan de yanhu jinxing geming huodong" in Zhongguo Renmin Zhengzhi Xieshang Huiyi, Shanghaishi Weiyuanhui Wenshi Ziliao Gongzuo Weiyuanhui, ed., Jiu Shanghai de banghui (Shanghai, 1986), p. 360.

their activities. Many of the associations appear to have been created at the time of the 1931 flood that devastated large portions of Subei. They raised money to help refugees relocate.^[81] Aside from relief work, none of the Subei migrants I interviewed could recall an instance in which they had had any contact with the native-place associations from their area. They assumed the organizations catered primarily to people of wealth. This at least suggests that the Subei native-place associations did not serve as quasi employment agencies in the way that the larger, more prestigious Jiangnan guilds did.

All these factors, then, contribute to an explanation of the concentration of Subei people in the unskilled sector of the Shanghai labor market. Migrants or refugees from an often poverty-stricken area, Subei people seemed willing to perform the most menial, lowest-status jobs in Shanghai. To them, even the worst job in Shanghai was preferable to life in Subei. Most had no non-farm skills when they arrived in Shanghai, making it difficult to secure jobs requiring other skills. More important, however, they lacked the personal and institutional connections—based on native-place ties—that might have given them access to those jobs, enabling them to move out of the unskilled sector as migrants from Jiangnan were able to do.

One question remains concerning the jobs dominated by Subei people. We observed that a number of Subei people (particularly women) worked in factories and that several industries relied heavily on Subei workers. Yet factory work was the highest to which Subei people progressed in Shanghai's job hierarchy; moreover, they never seemed to represent the majority of factory workers. How are we to explain why Subei people never dominated the ranks of Shanghai's industrial proletariat? That most factory owners and managers were from Jiangnan is only part of the answer. Given their interest in maximizing profit, one would expect them to have hired the cheapest labor available, presumably people from Subei. Why did this not happen? Supply was not at issue, particularly after the major floods of 1911, 1921, and 1931 brought massive numbers of Subei people to Shanghai, many of whom were constantly unemployed.

The failure of Subei people to dominate factory jobs requires a consideration of some of the factors that have been used to explain the scarcity of Chinese workers in California factories during the mid and late nineteenth

[81] Shen Bao , Sept. 2, 8, and 10, 1931.

century, the initial absence of Irish immigrants in factories of the American Northeast, and the prolonged absence of black workers in factories throughout the United States.^[82] In all these situations, factory owners chose not to draw on the cheapest sources of labor. The most important explanations that have been offered concern popular prejudices, among both factory managers and workers.

If popular attitudes toward and beliefs about Subei people are an indication, then they were quite possibly regarded as undesirable workers. People from Subei, as noted above, were commonly perceived as poor, dirty, backward, and uncultured. "In general, Jiangnan people are civilized, while Jiangbei people are coarse," reads a typical description.^[83] "People dislike [Subei people] because they are dirty and rude," states another.^[84] Yet another, slightly more specific, observes that "in terms of personality, Jiangnan people are soft and flexible, while Jiangbei people are firm and strong. . . . In terms of customs, religion, and superstition, Jiangnan people tend to be more civilized and open-minded."^[85]

Although it is difficult to determine how much these views affected hiring decisions, they most likely contributed to a prejudice against Subei workers among factory managers from Jiangnan, who were willing to pay a higher price for workers more familiar to them. One cotton mill engineer, recalling hiring practices in the 1920s and 1930s, stated this explicitly. "In cotton spinning," he said, "we tried to use as many natives as possible. It's hard to say why. It is not good to say that Subei people are not good workers. It's just that there are certain social attitudes. It's easier to talk to natives. Subei people are harder to handle. We did not like Subei people very much."^[86] Subei women who tried to get jobs in the mills often had to dress in a way that would disguise their origins and allow them to pass as Jiangnan natives.^[87] Cotton was one of the few industries that employed a large number of Subei people, but this was most likely because by the 1920s roughly half of

[82] On Chinese workers in California factories, see Paul M. Ong, "Chinese Labor in Early San Francisco: Racial Segmentation and Industrial Expansion," Amerasia 8, no. 1 (1981): 69–82. On the Irish, see Clyde Griffen, "The 'Old' Immigration and Industrialization: A Case Study," in Richard L. Ehrlich, ed., Immigrants in Industrial America , p. 194. The failure of blacks to become a major component of the industrial proletariat in the United States until World War II is discussed in Harold Baron, "Racial Domination in Advanced Capitalism: A Theory of Nationalism and Divisions in the Labor Market," in Richard Edwards et al., Labor Market Segmentation , p. 201.

[83] Wang Peitang, Jiangsusheng xiangtu zhi (Changsha, 1938), p. 369.

[84] Lu Manyan, "Jiangnan yu Jiangbei," Renyan zhoukan 1, no. 9 (June 23, 1934): 389.

[85] Zhao Ruheng, Jiangsusheng jian , chap. 8, p. 189.

[86] Interview with He Zhiguang, Putuo District Federation of Industry and Commerce, Shanghai, June 26, 1980.

[87] Honig, Sisters and Strangers , pp. 76–77.

Shanghai's cotton mills were owned by Japanese capitalists, who did not share the prejudice against Subei workers.^[88]

It is possible that ordinary workers shared the prejudice of factory owners and managers against Subei people. While they did not necessarily play a major role in hiring decisions (except through the introduction of friends and acquaintances for new jobs), groups of workers could make it difficult for others to maintain jobs, particularly if they felt that the newcomers threatened their job security. Given that Subei people entered the factory work force after people from Jiangnan, it is possible that the latter actively resisted the recruitment of these "northerners." In the Jiangnan arsenal, for example, Guangdong and Jiangnan workers made it impossible for people from Subei to become apprentices for skilled jobs.^[89] A similar phenomenon is suggested by an incident that ocurred in a cotton mill in 1920. A man from Rugao had wangled an introduction to a job as an apprentice mechanic in a Shanghai cotton mill. Enraged that he worked so hard, and fearful that he would eventually get their jobs, the other workers subjected him to physical and verbal harrassment until he finally left his job and returned to the countryside.^[90] If incidents like this occurred with any degree of frequency, we might conclude that territoriality, prejudice, and quasi-ethnic conflict among workers—reminiscent of the bitter protests against the use of immigrant workers by native artisans in nineteenth-century American cities—contributed to the failure of Subei people to dominate the ranks of the industrial proletariat.^[91]

Conclusion

Prejudice, then, combined with other factors to account for the tracking of Subei people into the unskilled sector of the Shanghai labor market. We have seen that Subei people initially came to Shanghai because of poverty and natural disasters in their home villages and therefore performed the most menial tasks to eke out a living. Because hometown connections played such a major role in securing jobs in Shanghai, subsequent waves of immigrants from Subei continued to be tracked into these jobs, for that is where they had connections. Eventually, as Shanghai industrialized and more complex and highly differentiated labor markets developed, the jobs performed by Subei people assumed an even lower status. As the attitudes toward rickshaw

[88] Honig, pp. 30–31, 77–78.

[89] Shanghai Shehui Kexueyuan Jingji Yanjiusuo, Jiangnan zaochuanchang changshi, 1865–1949 (Jiangsu Renmin Chubanshe, 1983), p. 155.

[90] Li Cishan, "Shanghai laodong qingkuang," p. 12.

[91] Griffen, "The 'Old' Immigration," p. 177. Also see Ong, "Chinese Labor in Early San Francisco."

pullers indicate, the association of Subei people with unskilled, physically demanding labor created and continually reinforced the belief that they were poor, ignorant, dirty, and uncivilized.

It would be misleading to imply that a simple relationship existed between prejudice and the status of Subei people in the labor market, that there was first prejudice and subsequently an inferior economic status. Popular beliefs about Subei people they may well have prevented their entrance into preferable labor markets, but the divisions in the labor market themselves contributed to the creation of these beliefs. The propagation of negative stereotypes about Subei and Subei people was partly a product of the development of segmented labor markets in Shanghai, serving to justify the unequal access of different groups of people to job opportunities.

Ten
Local Interest Story: Political Power and Regional Differences in the Shandong Capital Market,  1900–1937

Kenneth Pomeranz

Many issues in the early twentieth-century Chinese economy hinge on the capital market. The regional capital market is central not only to the relationship between richer regions, poorer regions, and economic change but also to an understanding of the extent to which the wealth of some groups and the poverty of others was the result of power and exploitation, rather than just differences in luck and skill. And in China, where several currencies, many with limited acceptance, circulated, any analysis of supra-local capital markets must also consider domestic currency markets. Looking at currency trading raises an often overlooked set of questions concerning relationships between state and economy in early twentieth-century China.

This paper examines capital markets in one province—Shandong—between the Boxer Uprising and World War II (1900–1937). Since some but not all parts of the province experienced rapid growth in these years, we must first explain why, as interest rates declined in more prosperous areas, funds did not flow to the more "backward" regions, in which credit commanded a higher price. It is not new to note that the links between rapidly growing regions and other parts of China were weak. Much of the literature on pre-World War II China argues that the rapid growth of those areas that were stimulated by the international economy did little for the rest of the country.^[1] But it is hard to prove that money made in China's "advanced" regions was rarely invested in the hinterland. Moreover, a number of scholars using aggregate national data now argue that there was an increasingly national

[1] For reasons of brevity, a review of the literature on various controversies mentioned here has been omitted. These references are available in my Ph.D. dissertation, "The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1900–1937" (Yale University, 1988), chap. 1, nn. 1, 2, 5, 7, and 94.

capital market, in which coastal funds were invested in the hinterlands. This position rests on three points. First, investors seek high returns, and institutional and technological changes were making information about far-flung opportunities cheaper. Second, regional differences in interest rates were narrowing. Third, without such investment, the unbalanced trade between coastal cities and the countryside (Shanghai, for instance, sold far more than it bought) should have led to money shortages and deflation in the countryside, causing a divergence between urban and rural prices; no such divergence has been observed.

Local credit markets are also controversial. Since North China had relatively little tenancy, discussions of economic exploitation there have centered on credit and marketing. Although numerous anecdotes show money-lenders abusing local monopolies, some of the aggregate data suggest that the cheaper funds available in Shanghai, Tianjin, and overseas made their way, through intermediaries, to enough outlets to create competitive rural credit markets.

Finally, recent research has highlighted both the development of national markets in prewar China and surprising continuities between Chinese state making before and after 1949. However, relationships between these two trends have received little attention. A provincial case study cannot resolve all these issues—especially since we still lack information from below the county level^[2] —but it can help us see how credit markets worked, and highlight important relationships between state making and market making.

I began by borrowing a technique used by two economic historians to estimate interest rates for medieval Europe. Using the estimates derived for each of Shandong's 12 prefectures, I did simple tests for market integration and found a surprising pattern. Not only did the province's money market not show the integration economists would likely predict where transport and information costs are low; the lines across which prices suddenly jumped did not correspond to the physiographic regions at whose boundaries most historians would expect trade networks to break down. Eventually, an investigation of traditional archival and published sources showed that this peculiar market segmentation could be traced to deliberate manipulation by certain local elites and local governments. To be more precise, the evidence suggests the following.

1. The province included three large and distinct regional capital markets (see Map 10.1). Interest rates in the poorest market (Southwest Shandong) were about 1.5 percent per month higher than in the most prosperous region (the North Coast) and approximately 0.6 percent higher than in the middle, or Heartland.

[2] See, e.g., "Shandong Gaomi Wei xian zhi nongcun jiehuo," Gong shang banyuekan 6, no. 4 (Feb. 15, 1934): 49.

Map 10.1.
Approximate Map of Shandong's Regional Capital Markets, 1911–1937.

2. The interest-rate differentials changed little between 1900–1911 and the 1930s.

3. These lasting differences were largely due to the ability of politically powerful people to restrict the flow of money in and out of their own county and to manipulate local silver-copper exchange rates while limiting others' access to the cheaper credit and silver available in more prosperous areas.

4. The artificial barriers kept the return on any hoardable or loanable asset (such as grain or money) higher in poor areas than elsewhere. Moreover, politically connected people who could cross the barriers made much greater currency-trading profits than those available either in purely local commerce or in commodities governed by national and international markets.

5. Divergence in commodity prices between the North Coast and the other regions was limited because the Heartland exported enough cash crops to avoid a silver drain and the Southwest, with fewer exports, bought few modern goods and exported laborers, who brought silver home. When Japan seized Manchuria in 1931 and curtailed migratory labor, the Southwest experienced a local deflation beyond that caused by the world depression.

6. While county governments most often obstructed currency and capital

markets, provincial officials were also caught between the advantages and disadvantages they expected from Shandong's integration into a larger economy.

7. The truncated money markets in Shandong, during a period in which many other markets became more integrated, show how politics shaped and limited market participation. These limits also handicapped governments trying to move resources, affecting state making as well as market making.

Shandong's Regional Capital Markets

We have numerous interest rates from particular times and places, but most cannot be used in systematic comparisons because they omit crucial information, such as who was charged this rate or what security was put up.^[3] However, we do have useful county-by-county figures for 1933.^[4] For 1900–1911 we can estimate interest rates using monthly grain prices and patterns of post-harvest price increases in each prefecture of Shandong, as Donald N. McCloskey and John Nash did for medieval England.^[5] Over the long haul, holding grain a few months before selling it will be no more or less profitable than selling the grain immediately and holding money; otherwise, more people would turn to the more profitable activity, until it ceased being so. Thus, the average rise in grain prices after the harvest should approximate the interest rate plus other storage costs (including safeguards against theft, and provisions for losses from rotting or rats).

This method involves looking at pairs of prices a month or a few months apart. For technical reasons, the most useful quotations are the high prices from each prefecture, recorded in the prefectural capitals.^[6] Ignoring pairs that end in or pass through harvest months—when prices reflected the value of the new grain rather than the accrued value of whatever little grain remained from the previous year—leaves 50 to 60 pairs for each of six grains in the 11 prefectures with reliable data. In ten, the results for the different grains are quite close, and so more trustworthy.^[7] We do not know how much

[3] E.g., Shandong zheng su shichaji , 1934, and Shina shobetsu zenshi (hereafter SSZ ) have many rates but no supporting details; the same is true of numerous magazine articles, gazetteers, memoirs, and so forth.

[4] Zhongguo Shiyebu, Guoji Maoyiju, Zhongguo shiye zhi: Shandong sheng (hereafter ZSZS ; Chinese industrial handbook: Shandong Province; Nanjing, 1934), pt. 5, pp. 91–97; for a discussion of these data, see Pomeranz, "Making of a Hinterland," app. B.

[5] Donald N. McCloskey and John Nash, "Corn at Interest: The Extent and Cost of Grain Storage in Medieval England," American Economic Review 74, no. 1 (Mar. 1984): 174–87; this method is discussed on pp. 178–83.

[6] The papers in Part One of this volume provide detailed explanations of the Qing system of grain price reporting.

[7] The prefectures that do not conform to this pattern are discussed in Pomeranz, "Making of a Hinterland," chap. 1, n. 12, and app. A.

of the average price increase represents interest, but other storage costs were similar across prefectures.^[8] Thus regional differences should reflect relative interest rates. The results are shown in Table 10.1.

The interest rates fall into three regional groupings; the regions are demarcated on the map. The North Coast area, which consisted of four prefectures, included the treaty ports of Yantai and Weihaiwei and had roughly 6.8 million people. With unusually strong ties to booming Manchuria, right across the Bohai Gulf, and access to the central and South China coastal regions, Shandong's North Coast had a privileged position, which gave it relatively easy access to hard currency (to be discussed later) and particularly low interest rates. Holding grain there earned less than 0.5 percent per month. At the other extreme is the second region: the Southwest, the prefectures of Yanzhou, Caozhou, and Jining, with about 6.4 million people.^[9] Returns there averaged 2 percent per month.

In the remaining prefectures, ranging from Yizhou (1.2 percent) to Dongchang (1.7 percent), returns averaged 1.4 percent. This largest region, the Heartland, with 21 million people, presents the least uniform picture but still appears to have been a meaningful capital market. Moreover, these prefectures are clearly separate from the other two groups, and traded with each other much more than with those areas. They were far more involved in outside trade than the Southwest was, and more a part of the North China regional economy than the North Coast, which was instead closely tied to Manchuria.

Rates derived from 1903–11 grain prices in neighboring prefectures of Zhili Province echo this pattern.^[10] Coastal Zunhua, closely tied to Manchuria, had rates like those in Shandong's North Coast (under 0.8 percent); Daming, adjoining Southwest Shandong, had rates like those in the Southwest (over 2 percent); three prefectures bordering the Shandong Heartland resembled that zone (rates were slightly over 1 percent).

Measures of dispersion for the Shandong results confirm the regional pattern. Within each individual prefecture except Laizhou, the returns from storing different grains are closely bunched around the prefectural mean for all grains. Entry and exit from local markets, storage activities, and switching between particular assets must have been fairly easy; as we shall see, this was not true of interregional money markets. To the extent that these grains are a random sample of all hoardable assets, the results suggest that in any

[8] The kinds of storage facilities in different parts of the province were the same, and inland areas were drier. Banditry was more serious in the Southwest than elsewhere, but in the hundreds of crime reports I have reviewed, stored grain was almost never a target (grain on the road to market sometimes was). The rat population may have been unevenly distributed, but I know of no reason to think so.

[9] There are a number of problems with the Jining data, which are discussed in Pomeranz, "Making of a Hinterland," chap. 1, n. 15, and app. A.

[10] See ibid., chap. 1, n. 17, and app. A.